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opencaching / okapi

A common API for all National Opencaching.XX sites
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Getting and Setting Personal Cache Notes #624

Closed hxdimpf closed 1 year ago

hxdimpf commented 1 year ago

This is about the service

https://www.opencaching.de/okapi/services/caches/save_personal_notes

If I want to explicitly push a specific "comment" to the server I must provide new_value and old_value. If I don't provide old_value the server will append new_value to what's already there. That is a very unsusual designpoint. FIrst of all, I must make an additional request in order to get the current value, which will later be the old_value when it comes to pushing a new_value. But what is much worse is the following: It is a common practice for geocachers to use the personal cache notes field to document the solutions of mysterys ("Quiz") an also for the Variables in Multi caches and their values and intermediate calculations thet at some point lead to the final coordinates. It is not uncommon that a user will end up with 5k to 10k characters.

Now assume he has initially sent an 8k block and then figures out there is a spelling error or a variable is missing. He just changes one charackter and has to submit 8k of old_value plus 8k of new_value ?

I would like to propose to add a parameter to the service to tell the server to undonditionally set new_value, discarding whatever might have been stored before. Alternatively, treat an empty string in old_value in such a way that new_value completely replaces what's on the server.

hxdimpf commented 1 year ago

I am closing this issue with a "works as designed". An offline conversation with one of the authors resulted in that status.