no doucmentation for accessing the api

[d4e666]

Version(s) tested against

v5

Description of Bug

there is no documentation to be found on how to access the api from outside. And nothing about any security implementation that is required. All I could find was info about the playground requiring an authorization header, but no info on how to obtain one.

[ZeldaZach]

Are you referring to the GraphQL API or the MTGJSON data dump "API" ? -- The GraphQL API is in beta still and is only available to Patrons, so the documentation external to the playground is a bit limited.

[d4e666]

even if the api is in beta, make sure that at least your own editor works instead of showing this kind of error or atleast state that you are not allowed to perform the action since I'm not in teh "beta tester" group.

This atleast makes things clear

[OzanKurt]

@d4e666 How would you suggest following the daily updates? Is there a place for us to see updated data separately without downloading the whole database?

[liberforce]

What is missing is really a section about strategies that can be used to download the MTGJSON data and updating it without having to require to download huge files. From what I saw, there is no data versionning, the only versionning is the one of the generation tool. "5.2.2+20252006" achieves little. The generation date is in the metadata field of the version, but it doesn't tell if that data is strictly the same as the day before. How does a third party app developer can know when the data is worth updating and when it is not? Checksum can't be used since that would means downloading the file. Then the etag field return when the file is first downloaded, but since the files are regenerated and their modification date is reset, this doesn't seem to work either.

The only option I can see here is downloading the checksum files (.SHA256) and checking if they have changed or not. Is this the prefered way?

[liberforce]

Ok, even checking the SHA256 won't work, since files are regenerated each day and every file has a meta field with a date + version, meaning that the SHA256 will change each time the file is regenerated, even if the whole data field didn't change.

[ZeldaZach]

@liberforce Your questions seem to be unrelated to the GraphQL API, of which we will look to improve documentation on in the future. Still, happy to try and answer your questions -- We do have plans on having a changelist/diff available in some capacity on a daily basis, but we haven't had the time to dedicate towards that functionality at this point. Lets chat more in mtgjson/mtgjson#1322