How does p-gc access my lab cache data?

Question

Can someone from the p-gc team explain through what API my lab cache finds are accessed? I haven't seen any such method in the GC Live API. Also, since p-gc does not have my password for the gc.com web site, how can it access this data?

Answer 1

Project-GC is mostly using Geocaching.com's "Geocaching LIVE api", as mentioned when authenticating/logging in. This gives us access to most of the data.

Besides that Project-GC is an Enterprise partner with Groundspeak, which we pay a license fee for. This grants us access to yet another API created specifically for us and no one else. We can fetch information about ALC finds using those additional API methods, and several other things.

Comments

Thanks for providing the insight. I know what API is used for Lab Caches, there is a Swagger documentation out there, however, I always thought GC HQ would never license access to that API at least not to those functions that require a consumer key. I also didn't know that there is a difference between "partner" and "Enterprise partner" and neither did I know that p-gc pays license fees.

What p-gc now provide with respect to Lab Cache statistics is by far better than what GC HQ provides on their website. Well done! Thank you very much.

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The Lab cache API that their app uses is a different API than we are using. In our special API we don't only have ALC data, but also other methods that makes the communication between PGC and GCCOM smoother. The official APIs aren't designed for a site like ours.

I don't know if they have other Enterprise partners today, from what we know we are the only one. We had a lot of meetings about 6 years ago with HQ, and this is what it ended up with.

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That makes a lot of sense to me. In fact this explains some of the mysterys I never understood.  Since p-gc is a serverside application, all the requests would basically come from one IP address or perhaps a very small set of different addresses. Under "Rate Limiting", they say: 6000 calls per minute per IP address .... and knowing that each user could do 60 calls per minute, this would limit a regular "partner" to supporing no more than 100 concurrently active user. So I always knew, there must be special arrangements between p-gc and GC HQ. I am actually glad that you were able to come to terms with them. Should you ever seek help in development, feel free to contact me, I believe I can say I know my way around these things.

Thanks very much for sharing the insights.