vwrsearch.secondlife.com suddenly returns null key

[joniveehernandez]

Hi any idea why the vwrsearch.secondlife.com used for name to key suddenly returns null key? is it down? becase last few weeks this thing is working. I already implement this function to my system :(

I'm using the name2key PHP code: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Takat_Su/Name2Key

[Freya Mokusei]

Using the URI-construction in your link:-

http://vwrsearch.secondlife.com/client_search.php?session=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&q=freya%20mokusei

This returns an empty page. That's why you're getting a null key, there's no information to return to your PHP code.

Unfortunately since I'm not a regular user of vwrsearch (It's been replaced by search.secondlife.com for most purposes), I can't say how common/uncommon this is. I do know that you cannot guarantee return or up-time for LL-owned web services, and Search itself will go down occaisionally. You should probably build detection for this into your system (so that null keys aren't retained).

There's no mention of the failure on SL Grid Status.

Not sure I can help further.

 

[joniveehernandez]

How about using http://w-hat.com//name2key/ ? since detection won't help because my object requires avatar names to be entered and determine their UUID. Those entered avatar names will be used by the script with purpose since that script requires also the UUID when some of my functions need to IM or check online/offline status of those avatars.

 

[ab Vanmoer]

vwrsearch has been working for years now, but periodically LL breaks it and then one has to file a Jira to have it fixed. After breaking it on what seems to be an annual basis, they then take ages to fix it. Which is a pity, because for the rest of the time it is the most reliable, up to date and easiest way of getting name2key functionality.

Unfortunately w-hat.com is not really a viable alternative, it is a third party web site that could disappear at anytime without warning (although despite earlier expectations, it has stayed up for years)  but it is often out of date, whereas vwrsearch finds new avatars within hours if not minutes of them registering.

As an alternative to using vwrsearch.secondlife.com one could use search.secondlife.com but the resultant web page does not seem to be consistent, so scraping it is a bit of a moving target.

 

[joniveehernandez]

I think search.secondlife.com will not return the UUID of the avatar. It's always pain in the a.. for functionalities that doesn't exists inworld making us limiting our creativities. If only LL provides us that built-in function inworld which is name2Key then it will be great but to what i suspect is they will not provide that function for some reasons like: it can use for spamming or grieffing. Unreaible name2Key functionality will be a catastrophe to my ongoing project.

[Qie Niangao]

Join the club. There's no reason LL doesn't supply llName2Key -- it's not as if they're preventing any griefing, only adding extra processing load for each query. So instead, if it's that important, you'll have to do what others have and just keep hanging alternative methods onto your scripts, to recover when the less resource-consuming methods fail. 

But search.secondlife.com results do seem to include the agent key. Assuming you're using chrome, try for example:

view-source:http://search.secondlife.com/?query_term=Qie%20Niangao&collection_chosen=people#

and search that source for "result_

The following text, up to the closing double-quote, is my UUID.

[ab Vanmoer]

LL has "sortof" fixed vwrsearch by redirecting it to search.secondlife.com - a completely pointless exercise because of the different behaviour between vwrsearch and search.

vwrsearch required that new names include the "Resident" last name, whereas search.secondlife.com seems to return better results without the Resident last name, and more importantly the resultant pages are different enough that the screen scraping code has to be completely rewritten.

[joniveehernandez]

Yes by checking it, the avatar UUID is in the source code. I will try the search.secondlife.com

[joniveehernandez]

If the UUID is on the source code then I need to dig the source code via PHP to get the UUID?

 

[Qie Niangao]

Yeah, you'd want to use some scripting language to scrape the html source returned by the search.secondlife.com query, and PHP is as good as any for something like this I suppose. I'm pretty sure you can't do it directly with LSL in-world scripts because, as I recall, you can't access the search URL from inside a script. You can probably still get around that using an external "reflector" service that simply relays queries and responses to sidestep the address restriction, but while you're at it there's not a lot more effort involved in scraping the results than just relaying them.