Aggregating information across accounts

I have a couple of addons that will track things across all toons on an account. I can look at the bank for any toon on the account and know how much gold they have and the account has total, as an example. I understand why it works this way is because of where the Addons save their setting and information is account based.

What would be nice is if there was a way for an addon to be able to go across accounts to aggregate all this information so that any toon that had the addon would be able to see all other information.

I would think this would be very multiboxing specific. Or at least for people that played multiple accounts.

I have no knoweldge of coding in LUA or if there are any WoW based restrictions to accessing other accounts folders or information. From the windows file side, everything has the same permissions. I suppose there are some security implacations with accessing other account's saved data.

So my first question is, is this even possible?
Number two I guess would be does this exist already? Or I am just a noob and need to search more?

If it is possible, and does not yet exist, would it be better to add this to an existing MBing addon or create something else from scratch?
Would it be easier to write a "wrapper" around an existing addon that does this account wide (so you already have a GUI built etc.) and pulls in additional data from other accounts to present it?

A solution for software boxers seems easier then for hardware boxers. Though I would think you could create a friends list type of system where if two toons are on each other friend's list (this being specific to this addon not the normal friend's list) they could share the information through one of those private channels things i read about once.

The things i would be most interested in are tracking gold and inventory. Does anyone else have any ideas for other things?

Would anyone else be interested in something like this?

I suppose I could look into doing it myself. I have extensive Unix shell scripting experience but have never really bothered to learn other programming languages, I would think I would be able to learn it.

So, if you are a developer of addons, is this even possible? Would it be better as a stand alone addon or as part of a larger Multiboxing addon?

If I were to do this myself would you recommend any specific resources or tutorials? I will hit the WoW site and the Addon forums for sure but if you have something that you thought was a great help when you first started doing this that could be a big help to me. Any hints, tips, gotchas or things to think about when putting this toegther would also be benificial.

Or, if you want to build this into an existing addon or as a stand alone addon I would be interested in working with you to help design and test it and if you want the guy starting from zero help coding it I would be willing to.

Thanks for readin my way to long post.

The easiest way i can see right off hand doing this would by using an external program something that parses all the data saved by wow.

you can probably can do this with a mod of some kind by sending info over a chat channel but if yeh have any large amount of data to push over the chat channel yeh end up hitting max limit
theres some limit on the amount of info yeh can send over chat cant remmeber of hand what it is.

Best bet would be to use one of the pre existing mods that aggregates all the data over one account then have an external program aggregate all the data over several accounts chances are yeh might not want to dump that data back into wow do memory limitations.

if yeh have some unix script knowledge yeh might not do to bad using perl to extract yer data then mangle to what ever format yeh need in

Im pretty sure LUA can't look at character information in a separate realm folder. The typical structure is WTF>>Account>>AcountName>>Realm>>Character>>Savedv ariables, the saved variables are stored for each character and when a char is loaded in wow the only saved information that char has access to is limited to the realm folder. This means that characters on separate accounts, can not see each others information, this is for obvious security reasons.
Now in game you can send any information you want to another char and any of those chars could store that information for their individual use. This is actually quite simple it just takes a long time for the characters to update each other without spamming themselves offline. Gold isn't too bad, even worn equipment comparison isn't too bad, bank and bag information would be slow. MultiboxerV2 already tries to update each other with bag information each time you open a trade, so loking at that function may help you out. Any addon that remembers an inspected character for you also does the same thing, it just builds a list of items and stores them with a name in the saved variables for the addon.
Anywho, good luck it would be a nice feature to have I just have no where near the time to write and test an addon to do it. Between work and life duties, I have very limited play time and want to get all I can done in that time :D

Thanks for the responses. The security issue was my biggest concern. I wasn't sure if you could get to other account's saved variables. Since you can't, I will need to think of another way to do this. One of my first thoughts was an external program or script. I had a bank mod a long time ago that you could use to export your inventory and then run an external script to convert it to HTML so you could upload it to a web site. I was hesitant about running the script and went through it with a fine tooth comb before running it. Most people don't trust something like that, and I don't blame them.

That being said, I think I will try that approach. I am going to start with gold. Just because I can never remember who got sent what gold. I probably have an extra 1k sitting around on various alts.

I will see where it goes from there.

Thanks again.

I also just found Altoholic http://www.wowinterface.com/download...8533.html#info kind of by accident. Which is everything I wanted and more, except the multiple account support. But! The author has stated that he is working on that feature for his next release. I will try and correspond with him and see if I can help or test for him.