Lugnet Partsref

[Orion Pobursky]

There a few links to Lugnet's Partsref scattered about the PT. What should we replace them with? Maybe we should roll our own solution?

[Steffen]

Running our own would mean to duplicate all the partsref work that went into BrickLink...
I doubt that we have the time for keeping all the data in it up-to-date (
- in what set was that part?
- available in what colors?
etc.
)

Where are those links buried?
Can we get rid of them?
My reasoning behind this is that
- we will not have time to keep such a database up to date
- I do not want to promote 1 special non-ldraw partsref site as if it was our "official one"

Instead, we should maybe add a search form for parts,
and return results from all partsref sites we currently know.

[Orion Pobursky]

Running our own would mean to duplicate all the partsref work that went into BrickLink...
I doubt that we have the time for keeping all the data in it up-to-date (
- in what set was that part?
- available in what colors?
etc.
)

Where are those links buried?
Can we get rid of them?
My reasoning behind this is that
- we will not have time to keep such a database up to date
- I do not want to promote 1 special non-ldraw partsref site as if it was our "official one"

Instead, we should maybe add a search form for parts,
and return results from all partsref sites we currently know.

I wasn’t really thinking of a set reference but more of a more interactive library reference and lookup. Currently the only real parts reference we have is ptscan and that doesn’t show images (or anything else beyond title). Each part detail page could then have a link to the set reference sites to look up sets.

[Steffen]

I understand.

As far as I know the PT already has 1 generated image for every part.

Example:

Unofficial Parts = https://www.ldraw.org/library/unofficial.../12891.png

Official Parts = https://www.ldraw.org/library/official/i...s/3001.png

(1)
I agree with you: that's only an image, it would be easy to extend that a little to a small info page
about a part, showing the file header + image.
In analogy to the URLs above, those URLs could be
https://www.ldraw.org/partsref/unofficia.../12891.png
https://www.ldraw.org/partsref/official/parts/3001.dat
That would not be a set inventory, just a part meta info page.

(2)
I always wondered why these images were not included in the part scan search, for example here:
https://www.ldraw.org/cgi-bin/ptscan.cgi?q=mursten
I would love to see small preview images in that list.
They maybe were left out to reduce traffic to our servers.
That's probably a reason not to do that. Or maybe only do it if the list is <=20 items or so.

[Philippe Hurbain]

I wasn’t really thinking of a set reference but more of a more interactive library reference and lookup. Currently the only real parts reference we have is ptscan and that doesn’t show images (or anything else beyond title). Each part detail page could then have a link to the set reference sites to look up sets.

A good part search engine providing answers with parts images would indeed be great. Even better with a part preview with web based 3D viewer...