Suggested

API Access to build 3rd party programs for analysis and charting

Hi there, this isn't exactly a request from me or someone specific. But can we have an API system that allows us to gather statistics about our leagues, teams, races which allows 3rd party programs to maybe draw up statistical data to allow us to represent our league, create tables, charts and graphs to allow us to analyse team and league histories. 

This would be a nice way to see how our cars, drivers and teams perform, and how they grow over time. Not to analyse best strategies or to create elitism. This may become necessary when  iGP Manager begins marketing it's game again.

Example chart, this is our current season's Point Scorer's positions as they've finished so far:

I’m not saying your idea is a bad one since many leagues do this themselves and the stats they produce go far deeper than your example, including detailed race analysis showing lap by lap positions, positions gained/lost over the race plotted across the season. Some of them are very detailed, they are also extremely insightful.

If some are already doing this to a high level of detail is an iGP solution really needed? It’s not that the devs don’t have a big wishlist as it is and surely, anyone wanting this would already being doing it?

This is why we're asking for API. Not for the devs to develop the tools but for an API that allows tools to be created to retrieve information about each race etc. As for the tools, I'd leave that up to the community to develop and share.

I manually entered information into a spreadsheet which took hours and shared with the league and the managers loved the information and found is interesting and could see how their races were going, and find trends and other things. The information I have created was well received.

Ok sounds interesting.  One of the leagues I was in (on this account) used to produce via a spreadsheet.  Don’t believe it was manual though and the others ( other accounts) used something else, but wouldn’t profess to know exactly what although it was automated.

As a developer myself the idea of an API is very exciting but I’m also not sure if it would help. As far as I know, lap by lap data gets deleted after 2 months so pulling the data would not be able to show all of the in depth information that you’re expecting. I could see the API being used as a race-by-race tool to collect that data and store it outside of iGP... but then it loses a lot of it's appeal simply because it requires some kind of manual work to execute it.

And I’ll just add, the deleting of the data is a necessity for the game itself which surely doesn’t have the means to store all lap by lap data for every league and race in the game. 

I have been thinking more about this. The API does provide one useful thing; data relationships. Since iGP is SSR, a lot of the pages get presented 'as is', there isn't necessarily a relationship between them.
Just to list some examples;

1. There is no relationship from a results popup to the race it comes from. If you were to open a result page, and change the id in the uri to a different number... you have no direct way to know where those results come from. You have to note down the date the results were posted, click into one of the drivers, then the team, and then look at the team history to find which league they were in on that race date.

2. There is no relationship on the results to a team. You can click into drivers, and then that will tell you the team the driver is currently in, but that might not necessarily be correct if the driver was released or transferred. It does show you the team name and colour, but there are a lot of instances where teams have the same name.

3. Race history has no relationship to a season. If you go to your race history, you can see a list of all of the races that you've taken part in. However, as above, you can't tell which season that result took place. In fact, there is no way to know when a past season took place in the game; unless you have a list of dates yourself, it is almost impossible to know.

4. There is no way to identify past races for a league (prior to the active season). Unfortunately, you can't open a league that you're not in and find a list of results, it doesn't seem to exist anywhere.

[Side note, it would be incredibly useful if, when looking at a previous season, it had three tabs; Drivers, Teams, and Results. It would only need to show the track name, with a link to the result at the least, and maybe the race winner. But I have no idea if this data is even stored anywhere.]

5. There is a confusing relationship between managers, users and teams, which I only discovered by accident.
Try this; click League on your menu, and click on an icon for a manager in the comments section and a popup will show. Note the uri:
https://igpmanager.com/app//d=profile&user=xxxxxxxxx&tab=overview.

Now from that popup, click one of the drivers, which will open a driver page, and at the top section you should see the team name again. Click that, you should get the same popup as before with the team details... but .... note the uri is different:
https://igpmanager.com/app/d=profile&team=yyyyyyyyyyy&tab=overview

Now, go back to the League page, click 'Elite', or whichever tier the manager you chose above is in, and click that team. Same team details page, but as before, note the uri:
https://igpmanager.com/app/d=profile&manager=zzzzzzzzz&tab=overview

The same page, with three uri's and three different id's. This almost caused an issue for me when collecting data, as I was clicking each team in the league and storing the manager id's as an identifier. Then, at some point I had to add another which I got to by clicking from the user ..... and by an absolute miracle, I had unknowingly copied a user id instead which happened to be identical to another manager's manager id, so I was able to catch the mistake and that's what led me to this discovery.


So yeah, if there was an API, even if it was something that had to be pinged manually after each race, it would clear up a bunch of these issues. :)

Man I'm so glad to see someone else pushing for something like this after years of struggle. In my attempts to automate various parts of iGP usage and data collection I ran into a few of the issues mentioned here. However from what I've been told the devs really want to limit any kind of automation, for example I almost got in trouble for my exploits. But perhaps their opinions will change with time.

As for the problems David P has laid out in his last message, I found some work arounds for my "bot", but others are genuinely infeasible to go around currently:

1. Very genuine issue and so easy to fix on iGP side. Simply a link to the league that the result came from would suffice, a round number would be very nice too.

2. Again very true. Each row should have a button which brings you to the driver, and one which brings you to the team. Again seems logical. My workaround includes grabbing the team name before I click on the driver button and using that to match against the list of teams the driver has been in

3. No easy workaround for that either, but again I don't think it would be too hard for iGP to add a season number to race results, so this kind of links back to one. I had to do what you said and manually compare dates to build up season per season list of races

4. My workaround is going through past results as this displays the league name BUT not very nice that this isn't properly implemented either. I like you're idea of including historic results on the "full standings" page. I guess it would have to be changed to a history page. I think team history should be changed and better queries should be added

5. YES YES YES, when I discovered this I couldn't believe how much they ruined it. WHY ARE THERE 3 DIFFERENT PAGES THAT ALL SHOW THE SAME THING. God damn it iGP ? Again I can't see how or why it would be easier to have all 3 pages. It doesn't help the user at all anyway.

My work around was to focus on storing team ID, since that is the only one which is always accessible from the 3 pages, you can always access team ID if you pick the team's lead driver and then go to that driver's current team.

Then if I ever access an unknown user or manager ID, I work out which team ID it relates to and store that relationship.


As a heavy data collector I agree with David P here and would love to see these small changes, a lot of them are just logical changes that would help even the less data oriented players. Going into a full API is another thing, and I unfortunately doubt it would happen. But at least fix up these silly choices/mysterious vacancies on these pages.