Science & Industry

Is this a thing of the past?

I've been doing Invention and T2 manufacturing for a few years now, I built a pretty simple spreadsheet which I was quite proud of that keeps track of the ~100 T1 blueprints I own and the corresponding T2 invention process.

With Crius, I'm having a hard time keeping up with the changes, I took a month off work and did a road trip pre-crius and I'm looking at setting up a new spreadsheet for Crius... however, I'm running into some problems.

It seems like I need programming skills beyond Excel to be able to do this in any scale now. I'm having a hard time figuring out what the entire cost of T1 Production / T2 Invention / T2 Production is going to cost me without actually going through the motions of doing it.

The reason I built my first spreadsheets was to keep track of what items were profitable by plugging in all the variables to figure it out myself what would be profitable BEFORE I built it.

I can't see any way of doing this now, without the use of APIs (I'm great with Excel, but have rarely had to pull data from the internet into Excel, so I'm not good with how CREST or other APIs work)

It seems there is two modes of doing T2 production:
1) Simple, GUI based, and hope it's profitable for people that are new to manufacturing, or...
2) Computer Programming required API usage with custom tools.

There doesn't seem to be anything in between. Would it be possible to still build a simple spreadsheet for production workout without relying on APIs? Does anyone still do this that can share how they built it?

However simple you may think your example usages are, they're invaluable for me in figuring out how an API works. It actually seems simpler than I thought. [EDIT: this example usage stuff is exactly what I was missing in all these forum threads, I must have read 20 threads before posting my own, never understood it till you posted that page.]

Any idea how to easily get T1 and T2 BPO info into a spreadsheet? I slowly built a spreadsheet by manually inputting the material requirements every new T1 BPO I got and researched, now that data has changed, I have to manually re-enter the info, or somehow import it.

Thank you for putting that API page together.

I use excel vs google docs, simply because for what I was doing with it, it was too slow ( or my spreadsheets too complex ).

One feature that is missing from Excel that google docs makes easy is ImportXML. There is a way to do it in excel by default, but i find it lacking in the simplicity that google docs offers.

Here is what I do. In Excel open the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (accessed through the developer tab in Excel, which you may have to unhide since Excel does not display this by default.). Once you have it open, you will need to insert a new module, then simply copy+paste the function that is at the end of this post, and save the excel document as a MACRO enabled document, extension (.XLSM). This function will allow you now ala google docs, type in =ImportXML("url","string") to get the information you want (pricing) or using one of the many JSON to XML converted API's to call up CREST API for job data.

There is one flaw to Excel's UDF for ImportXML; it does not auto refresh. For me I use an Excel cell for my location and typeid's, so all I have to do is delete the cell location that the formula is pointing to and put it back in and it refreshes it.

In addition there is probably a limit on how many of these you can easily use in your document before it starts misbehaving. I use no more than about 100, which works fine for me.

Example Usage: =importXML("http://api.eve-central.com/api/marketstat?usesystem=30000142&typeid=34","/evec_api/marketstat/type/sell/min")

This gives you the price at Jita, for typeid 34 which is tritanium, at the minimum sell order price. for buy order you would use /evec_api/marketstat/type/buy/max

I do not take original credit for this function, although I did modify it to fit same functionality as Google Docs.

Public Function ImportXML(xmlUrl As String, xmlPath As String) As Double

Dim xmlHttp
Set xmlHttp = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
Call xmlHttp.Open("GET", xmlUrl, False)
Call xmlHttp.send

Dim xmlDoc
Set xmlDoc = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xmlDoc.async = "false"
xmlDoc.LoadXML xmlHttp.responsetext
xmlDoc.setProperty "SelectionLanguage", "XPath"

Set ndOutput = xmlDoc.DocumentElement.SelectSingleNode(xmlPath)
ImportXML = ndOutput.Text

End Function

Edman.... you deserve a medal.

Tool's older stuff is great, not too sure about the new stuff though.

Eve central prices into excel (and google docs)
https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/2013/06/22/importing-price-data-into-spreadsheets/

Crest price indexes into excel (should be pretty simple to extend to also pulling in price data. the code is pretty simple)
https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/2014/07/26/excel-and-crest/

May be of interest.

With excel 2010 and up, there's also filterxml() which works pretty much like importxml does.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/excel-help/filterxml-function-HA102781000.aspx

For T1 qnd T2 I made a simple c# app that parses blueprints.yaml and connects to mssql database where I imported the static datadump. With that info I have it create a table with each row for an item and a column for each used material(1 column for T1 item for t2 production, amount of columns would otherwise explode) and statistic I need.
I can then copy this this to my google docs page.

Ok Fuzz, got a question on Excel for you - how can I take that IndustryActivityMaterials.xls and have excel format the data as blueprints in the first column, then material types in the following colums, with the rows showing the quantities of each? I'm a vlookup king, but I can't figure out how to get this to work with my current spreadsheet.

so like...

BP TypeID Tritanum Pyerite Mexallon etc etc
683 22222 8000 2444 etc etc

The info's all there that I need, I'm just having trouble figuring out how to format it this way without manually copy/pasting it in for all the BPOs I own.

Now I am intreagued. Which band is this, pray?

- Myfanwy

p.s. Great thread.

The band is 'Tool'

http://toolband.com/

'Lateralus' is from the CD 'Lateralus', my favorite songs were some of their older stuff - Forty Six & 2, Schism, Eulogy, etc.