NationStates API (nationdata/regiondata)

[Xtoshtia]

Hello, sorry if I went to the wrong person, I just don't know where else to go about this, but I haven't been on nation states for a couple days. I checked today at about 9:00PM (Eastern Time, United States) and I got a message from the WA saying I violated rules by having more than one nation in the WA. I didn't do this. I do have multiple nations, but none of them are in the WA, so I'm not sure what happened, I just don't want to lose admission in the WA. Thanks for any help.

[Kaboomlandia]

Hello, sorry if I went to the wrong person, I just don't know where else to go about this, but I haven't been on nation states for a couple days. I checked today at about 9:00PM (Eastern Time, United States) and I got a message from the WA saying I violated rules by having more than one nation in the WA. I didn't do this. I do have multiple nations, but none of them are in the WA, so I'm not sure what happened, I just don't want to lose admission in the WA. Thanks for any help.

File a GHR.

[Tribes Republic]

Are there any plans to build a REST API set up for windows phone apps as a direct app would be good to have the mobile site is fine, but I want to include other features from NS++ in the app just I may have to work around gameside until I can find a way to integrate the forum in the app so it's not just a link to the forums on the mobile browser.

[[violet]]

On the Telegram API: When the script breaks the API script limit, it doesn't give much useful information other than that you broke it.
I think in the style of the "queued" message, it'd be more helpful if it returned something along the lines of "@@Rate Limit Hit@@ by &&CLIENT&& wait @@X@@ seconds to send" to allow easy error checking.

The API does return a "Retry-After" HTTP header when you break the rate limit, which specifies how many seconds you need to wait before you can successfully try again.

[Xoriet]

I'm not 100% sure this belongs here, but the Timestamps for the API area seem to be a little wonky right now. I've used several different methods and I keep getting times which do not add up conclusively with update length. I was using the legislation timestamps to determine the exact update time of specific regions during one update, which is how I found a weird inconsistency with the update times. Some are too soon for Major and some are well after the last region updates.

Result samples from Yahoo Pipes during update Friday Major, June 19th.

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 23:11:19 -0700
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 23:58:47 -0700
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 23:35:33 -0700
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 22:58:11 -0700
Fri, 19 Jun 2015 21:07:19 -0700

Result samples from Online Conversion for the same regions with the same Timestamps.

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 06:11:19 GMT
Sat, 20 Jun 2015 06:58:47 GMT
Sat, 20 Jun 2015 06:35:33 GMT
Sat, 20 Jun 2015 05:58:11 GMT
Sat, 20 Jun 2015 04:07:19 GMT

Is/was there something up with the Timestamps?

[Frisbeeteria]

Is/was there something up with the Timestamps?

Update timing got screwed up in the latest maintenance cycle last weekend. There's a thread about it here in Tech. Check your timings there.

[The Norths Alliance]

I have an issue with the telegrams API (I'm sure I'm just being stupid and not doing something right):
I am just trying to test the API telegram I have composed by copying and pasting the url into my browser. I am only sending it to myself to do the test, and I receive the following error:
Error: 429 API Recruitment TG ratelimit exceeded by client "@The Northern Alliance@ The Norths Allia".

Help?

[Frisbeeteria]

Error: 429 API Recruitment TG ratelimit exceeded by client "@The Northern Alliance@ The Norths Allia".

I don't know if this reflects accurately on the API itself, but TGs tagged as recruitment are blocked if they exceed more than [one TG, per nation, per region, every 28 days]. So the first TG sent or tested would be successful, but you can't send it to yourself for another month. Also, your TGs are rate limited to one every 180 seconds (I believe), so you'd have gotten an error if you tried to test more than once every 3 minutes.

Then again, it could be something else entirely. I'm not an API user or expert.

[The Norths Alliance]

Error: 429 API Recruitment TG ratelimit exceeded by client "@The Northern Alliance@ The Norths Allia".

I don't know if this reflects accurately on the API itself, but TGs tagged as recruitment are blocked if they exceed more than [one TG, per nation, per region, every 28 days]. So the first TG sent or tested would be successful, but you can't send it to yourself for another month. Also, your TGs are rate limited to one every 180 seconds (I believe), so you'd have gotten an error if you tried to test more than once every 3 minutes.

Then again, it could be something else entirely. I'm not an API user or expert.

So, I can only send one recruitment telegram with API every 28 days?

[Frisbeeteria]

So, I can only send one recruitment telegram with API every 28 days?

As of this moment, "The world contains 134,609 nations in 18,656 regions." Since you can only send one API recruitment telegram every 3 minutes, it would take you 279.81 days just to hit each of them once. So yeah, the [28 day / per region / per nation] limit isn't really that much of a limitation.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

I don't know if this reflects accurately on the API itself, but TGs tagged as recruitment are blocked if they exceed more than [one TG, per nation, per region, every 28 days]. So the first TG sent or tested would be successful, but you can't send it to yourself for another month. Also, your TGs are rate limited to one every 180 seconds (I believe), so you'd have gotten an error if you tried to test more than once every 3 minutes.

Then again, it could be something else entirely. I'm not an API user or expert.

So, I can only send one recruitment telegram with API every 28 days?

To any given nation, to be specific. And you can send them, they just won't be received

[The Norths Alliance]

But, why wasn't I able to send the API telegram to myself even once?
Also, does my API script have to call the NS API once every 3 minutes, or can it make one big call and then NS will send the telegram to a nation every 3 minutes?

[Misley]

But, why wasn't I able to send the API telegram to myself even once?
Also, does my API script have to call the NS API once every 3 minutes, or can it make one big call and then NS will send the telegram to a nation every 3 minutes?

One call every 3 minutes. It's safest to make it call the API something like every 3 minutes + 2 seconds though, because if your script skips a tick and tries to send another TG too early, it won't send.

[Lordieth]

I mused some time ago about creating an online version of NationWars, an old application I built a few years back, and I have a question regarding the registration system;

Nations will be able to register their nation to participate in NationWars, and use their nation to compete against other registered Nations. To ensure only Nation owners can register their own Nation, the system would have to automatically send a telegram to that nation with a confirmation link to activate their account.

I once brought this up with Violet quite some time ago, and I believe it was something that could be discussed, even though it's not covered by the current rules. In order for the system to work, Nation owners have to be able to verify themselves with NationWars. You just can't build an account-based system on top of NationStates without user authentication, and this is the easiest way to do it. All the telegrams would come from just one Nation, which will be used to send the authentication telegrams, so this could be cleared beforehand if some sort of exception rule has to be added within the system to allow it to send the telegrams.

Is this possible? If so, I might consider going ahead with building the platform. Firstly I'll need to automate downloading and converting the daily dump file into a database to limit API calls before I even start on the infrastructure, but I know it's worth pursuing if I know users will be able to register their nations. Otherwise, I'll be rather limited in what kind of platform I'll be able to build.

I'm not saying I still couldn't build something without user registration, but it won't be anywhere near as fun.

(Edit: as an aside, I've written a quick parser in PHP for the daily data dump, and it takes approx between 0-20 seconds to find a Nation, or return no result, which is why I'll be writing a cron script to store nations in a database table for lightning-fast indexing)

[The Vines]

*snip*

Have you looked into the Authentication API? That feature was designed specifically for use cases like yours.

[Lordieth]

*snip*

Have you looked into the Authentication API? That feature was designed specifically for use cases like yours.

Ah, very good. I'll look into that. Could be just what I need.

[The Vines]

For all you FP nerds out there, I've released an API client for Haskell (docs, github).

[violet] you might like to add this to the list

[Esterild]

Would it be possible to add censusmax and censusmin shards to the World API? These would be similar to the censusmedian shard. They could represent either the absolute minimum and maximum census values - or, if there are no absolute limits, they could represent the calculated maximum and minimum over all the nations in the census. Thank you!

[Esterild]

Would it be possible to add censusmax and censusmin shards to the World API? These would be similar to the censusmedian shard. They could represent either the absolute minimum and maximum census values - or, if there are no absolute limits, they could represent the calculated maximum and minimum over all the nations in the census. Thank you!

Bump! I know everyone's pretty busy, but it would be great if this could happen.

[Eclectic Danta]

So where would I go if I want to learn how to use NS API in Java (assuming I don't really know how to do anything at all)? I'm interested in making a small script to do automatic calculations of RP Statistics for various nations in my region. But I have no idea how to put together a program that calls the NS API and has it return information from various shards, including population, name, govt - or even how to extract GDP information from industrydesc. Essentially, my question is, where can I find an example of a script that calls for information from NS API and puts it to use in the program?

[Laevendell]

So where would I go if I want to learn how to use NS API in Java (assuming I don't really know how to do anything at all)? I'm interested in making a small script to do automatic calculations of RP Statistics for various nations in my region. But I have no idea how to put together a program that calls the NS API and has it return information from various shards, including population, name, govt - or even how to extract GDP information from industrydesc. Essentially, my question is, where can I find an example of a script that calls for information from NS API and puts it to use in the program?

Here is a short example that should get you going: https://code.google.com/p/ns-api/wiki/BasicUsage
I haven't updated the API in a little while, so it might be missing some of the latest features.

[[violet]]

For all you FP nerds out there, I've released an API client for Haskell (docs, github).

[violet] you might like to add this to the list

Added!

[[violet]]

Would it be possible to add censusmax and censusmin shards to the World API? These would be similar to the censusmedian shard. They could represent either the absolute minimum and maximum census values - or, if there are no absolute limits, they could represent the calculated maximum and minimum over all the nations in the census. Thank you!

We don't collect those values at the moment, so there is nothing to export. You could only calculate them for the current World Census by scanning a daily dump for the largest and smallest values.

[Zemnaya Svoboda]

Code: Select all

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/api.cgi?q=region+endorsements+happenings&v=5&nation=niimiipu
Line Number 32, Column 96:

<TEXT>Following new legislation in @@niimiipu@@, Rupert Bear is considered to be the most risqu&eacute; TV programme in Niimiipu.</TEXT>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^

Basically in nation api requests with happenings included such as this one it's possible to get an "é" which is not valid XML unless explicitly defined. Since the encoding is now UTF-8, it should be possible to communicate the legislation without such escaping (assuming of course that nation custom fields are all properly screened against badness). Alternatively of course you could say that the NS API will include html entities and we should deal with that

[[violet]]

with happenings included such as this one it's possible to get an "é"

Should be fixed now.