Re: GetAggregateCaches

Before I suggest a new method, let me explain what I wish to do… so you can consider other methods as well.
I would like to know the number of Reward Virtuals (Virtual caches published between 8/24/2017 and 8/24/2018) that have been published in a given country and region. There will never be more that 4000 of these and as of January 8th, there are only 1081 published. Using Map Compare on the 8th, I was able to determine the following:

As of January 8th, 2018 the current Reward Virtuals statistics are:

1,081 Reward Virtuals Published.
That is 27% of the 4000 will be made available to publish between 8/2017 and 8/2018.
4 have already been archived.
7 are temporarily unavailable at present.
The US has 209 of the 1081 or 19% of published reward virtual caches.
The state of Texas has 7 (0.6% of world, 3.3% of US).
Germany has 223 which is 21% of world wide reward virtual caches.
The time period for publishing reward virtuals is 365 days.  We are currently 38% of the way through that period.

I would like to write a non-checker script to update and expand on these statistics. It could even follow a typical challenge out put such appending personal statistics to the above stats:

Congratulations TravelingGeek!  You have found 16 Reward Virtual Caches!
That is 1.5% of the currently published reward virtuals and 0.4% of the possible 4000. 
You have found the equivalent of 7.7% of the US published caches.
You have found the equivalent of 229% of the Texas published caches.

I started thinking about this with the intent of publishing challenge caches for finding 1, 5, 10, and 15 reward virtuals. My friendly neighborhood reviewer reminded me that I need to be sure there are several local cachers that could meet the requirements… the most I could find locally had only found 3.
In doing that research, I found the above statistics so instead of challenge caches (yet) I want to have a script that will produce some interesting statistics that could be shared in caching groups or social media.
I’m not sure this fits project-gc.com but I think it could be. I don’t know… maybe this would be better in something like BadgeGen but I know Project-gc and don’t know them.
In any case, here are the methods I would propose to implement the above:

GetAggregateCaches By Region, By Country, All. Take the standard filters to limite types and hidden dates.

Alternatively, a purpose built API could be: GetRewardVirtuals ByRegion, ByCountry, All.

Not sure how easy this would be on the PGC infrastructure, but if a json file could be updated on a weekly basis, I could use GetJson to accomplish what I want.

All that said about what I want to do, I think the GetAggregateCache api could have some very interesting uses for challenge checkers. There are many scripts that “sum up” regions or types or sizes… GetAggregateCaches could implement much of that behind the API where things run much more efficiently (I presume) and reduce the load on the challenge checker compute resources.

What do you think?

How is this different than what GetNumCachesInArea() does?

After testing I cannot get GetNumCachesInArea() to work.

Sorry, I missed you message in May. I will give it a try.... although the need has long gone past. I'm still very curious about the virtuals.

Dr. Acorn got me over the hump. I am still frustrated that I cannot request the entire world for something like a jasmer by month.

I am also finding it is a slow API. It seems to be a 4 to 5 seconds per call which for a Jasmer could be on the order of 200 for a complete newbie or rare cache type. It would be nice if it sped up be a factor of 20 or more. My guess is that some intermediate table might need to be created.

https://project-gc.com/forum/read?4,53808,53808#msg-53808

Dr. Acorn's advice