Data sharing between addons on seperate accounts

i casually dual box. started my second account just before RAF (which annoyed the hell out of me) but thats another post.

i'm keen to share data between addons. in particular Auctioneer Advanced scans that have complete data whichever account i'm on and ArkInventory item managment that encompasses all the toons on both my accounts.

i understand that Blizz only allows addons to do i/o to the <wow path>\WTF\Account\<username>\SavedVariables\ directory. one method described on the Auctioneer forums is to (in vista) link the data files using symbolic links. the mklink DOS shell command.

i am considering writing a small program to simplify setting up these symbolic links for multiple accounts.

i am posting here to:

- firstly ask if something already exists which allows this type of data sharing?

- secondly ask if there are other addons which would benefit from this sort of data sharing?

thanks in advance

Anti

I think there are a few addons that could benefit from this, though some of them have already got a way to share the data while ingame, though through manually initiated transfer and rather slowly. (Altoholic)

I'd be interested in seeing what you can come up with.
Would make it easier to keep profiles for various addons such as Macaroon synchronized between accounts.

i dont know of one that already exists, i have looked myself and also use ArkInventory, it's the closest thing i can find to what you are describing.

I know personally, if you made a addon that shares the info i would love to test it, just shoot me a pm

I symlink (NTFS mklink) all of the config directories for each account together per instance of WoW. For example:

C:\wow1\WTF\Account\account1 => normal directory
C:\wow1\WTF\Account\account2 => symlink to ..\account1
C:\wow1\WTF\Account\account3 => symlink to ..\account1
...

C:\wow2\WTF\Account\account1 => normal directory
C:\wow2\WTF\Account\account2 => symlink to ..\account1
C:\wow2\WTF\Account\account3 => symlink to ..\account1
...

If you do it this way each instance of WoW acts like all of your toons share a common account. Since the toon names have to be different anyway, there aren't any settings collisions.

I don't try to share settings *between* instances of WoW. I found that causes problems when you log off -- changes from toon1 stomp those from toon2, etc.

yeah its the sharing between instances that i'm going to try and make as painless as possible.

if two or more instances of WoW are symlinked the last one to log out overwrites the saved data from the previous instances.

symlinking the whole \SavedVariables directory works for all addons and only requires one 'mklink' command to be used.

however doing it this way means every addon has this overwrite issue.

what i'm hoping to achieve is, to instead link file by file within the \savedvariables directory for each addon that I want to share data.

Auctioneer has 10 files it saves scan data and historic pricing information to. ArkInventory has one. so for each instance and each account of WoW thats 11 mklink commands.

i only run two instances and two accounts and 33 mklink commands were enough to get me thinking about writing a simple tool to automate it. i can only imagine how much you 5 boxers would appreciate such a tool.

to be clear this wont be an addon. the limits Blizz places on addon input/output make it impossible to achieve shared data across accounts except through in game chat channels (which is something the origional addon writers would have to implement). this would be a stand alone executable that makes operating system level changes to your save files. it would require admin level privaledges to run on vista. i'm not sure i'd run something like that someone else wrote...lol.



Anti

you could try to symlink the file as opposed to the whole directory.
if you have vista, symlink the Auctioneer saved variables file.

I would just have one account do all of the auctions if I were you.
I have a bank toon and he's the only one that ever sells or buys on the AH.

I'd suggest doing the symlinking manually to see if you like the results before doing all of the work to automate it. For Auctioneer I personally don't want it running on slave accounts, so sharing data between WoW instances wouldn't help me. There are some addons where I wind up having to make the same changes 5x times, but I usually find that faster than dealing with the annoying conflicts from a last write wins situation. YMMV. GL! :)

Quote:

---

i'm not sure i'd run something like that someone else wrote...lol.

---

That.

I just want any easy little window that tells me how much gold I have total and, if I want to dig deeper, who has how much. That is all I care about.