EQFriends consolidation tool

[salimoneus]

Tired of having your friends list be out of sync between all your toons? You know that you added your buddy's new necro alt to one of your toons, but were you on one of your several mules at the time, or perhaps was it your main?

Now you can eliminate all the guesswork and manual editing of character files, trying to keep a dozen or more files in sync. EQFriends is here to help!

It's a pretty straight forward interface, and once a couple basic steps are completed it's basically a single click operation to sync all your friends at once. It can also sync your ignore lists with a simple mode switch. Here is what the interface looks like:


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Configure and Usage

To get it configured initially, simply set the EQ installation folder, then select a Server, and EQFriends will load up all the character files for that server, and generate a complete list of unique friends in the right box for all the selected characters. Pressing the Update button will set the new friends list for the selected characters.

The application can be switched to operate on the ignore lists for the same character files simply by changing the mode selector from Friends to Ignored. Everything else will work the same.

By default it will pre-select all characters files in the left box for the active Server, but you can change the character selections and perform updates on whichever characters desired. For instance I could change the selection to only Tondor and Tenedor and it would only show friends contained in both of those character files. Pressing the Update button would set the friends list for only those two characters. However most people will probably just want to use the default behavior of having all characters selected, but the flexibility is there:


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Limitations

Since the EQ client only supports up to 100 friends or ignores, pressing Update will pop an error message if there are more than 100 friends in the right list. If this occurs simply go through the list of friends and delete enough so that there are no more than 100, and then perform the Update again. When there are more than 100 friends in the list, the Total will be highlighted in red to indicate that deletions are necessary. You can see below I have too many friends in my list, so I have selected one for deletion and can delete it by hitting the Delete key:


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Allowing for the ability to selectively delete stale friends from the list is the main reason I decided to write this as an interface app, as opposed to a simple automated script or program which just truncates the list. I would prefer to decide which names should get removed instead of having them chosen for me.


Backups and Errors

If the Create Backups option is enabled, it will create backup copies of all character files before any change are made. This option is enabled by default, and I would suggest leaving it enabled to allow for a simple copy restore. The backup files are stored in the EQFriends_Backups folder under the EQ installation directory.

The tool will write all runtime errors to the EQFriends.err file in the same folder as the program itself. If you are having some issues or the tool does not seem to be working please PM me the contents of this file so I can investigate.


Preferences

The application does save your preferences, so in between each run it will remember your EQ Install folder, selected Server, and Backup option. It will start up with everything loaded as it was when last used, and allow for a "single click" update.


Technology and Download Links

This tool requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4 so if you do not have that please install using the link provided.

I am providing the complete C# source code, built with VS2010, as well as a zip file containing a Win32 executable. On Windows7 it will save your settings to an XML file in the c:\users\myusername\AppData\roaming\EQFriends folder, and the location will vary on other versions of Windows. It is open source code with no viruses or ads, nothing but the code.

Latest release on GitHub: https://github.com/salimoneus/EQFriends/releases/latest

I hope someone finds this tool useful. Feel free to post feedback and/or any issues you may have.

[salimoneus]

Made a minor update to the release, same download links.

[salimoneus]

Updated release allows for multi-selection in the friends list on the right.

[salimoneus]

Added Copy/Paste buttons to friends list, useful for friend copies between servers, or to another install of EQ in a different folder.

As a result the friend count was relocated to the title bar.


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[salimoneus]

Added color indicator to friends list (yellow instead of white) when it detects a merge is needed:


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[Grimjaw]

Good work! I just used it to consolidate all of my lists.

Some quick feedback:


- Upon launch, I receive the following error message. The error message gets written to a file called EQFriends.err in the launch directory.

System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Users\removed\AppData\Roaming\EQFriends\userSettings.xml'.
at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy, Boolean useLongPath, Boolean checkHost)
at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share)
at EQFriends.Form1.ReadConfigData()



- You should provide the ability to clean-up (aka delete) old character files. Such as old toons, ones you logged into one time, toons on old servers, etc)


- Did you test to see if the 100 limit is coded into the titanium client? What happens if you try adding more manually into the file? The client doesn't know they exist?


- Can you make it check & prevent it from adding a player to its own list (eg: prevent Mark from being added to Marks own friends list, when it was copied over from Janes list). This occurs when people play on shared/friends toons, and then also have that toon on their friends lists, thus having both a friend entry and also a friend list for that toon.

[salimoneus]

Originally Posted by Grimjaw [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Good work! I just used it to consolidate all of my lists.

I'm glad it worked well for you!

Originally Posted by Grimjaw [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Some quick feedback:


- Upon launch, I receive the following error message. The error message gets written to a file called EQFriends.err in the launch directory.

System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Users\removed\AppData\Roaming\EQFriends\userSettings.xml'.
at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy, Boolean useLongPath, Boolean checkHost)
at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share)
at EQFriends.Form1.ReadConfigData()

It's normal to receive that message the first time the application is run, as the config file will not exist yet. It should not appear again once the config file is created. I believe I made that particular error a "silent" error so that it does not display a popup window, and only log to the file. Although technically it really isn't an error. I should probably add a check to see if the file exists first instead of letting it get logged as a "file not found" exception, to eliminate any confusion there. Lazy programmers [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] In any case it's harmless and can be ignored.

Originally Posted by Grimjaw [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

- You should provide the ability to clean-up (aka delete) old character files. Such as old toons, ones you logged into one time, toons on old servers, etc)

That's an interesting idea. Although I'm not sure if I want this app to be responsible for such a task. In general I'm not a big proponent of deleting files if there isn't a very good reason to do so, especially files that I did not create myself. I do see some utility in such a feature however, and it seems worthy of consideration.

Originally Posted by Grimjaw [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

- Did you test to see if the 100 limit is coded into the titanium client? What happens if you try adding more manually into the file? The client doesn't know they exist?

Yes this is a hard limit imposed by the EQ client unfortunately.

Originally Posted by Grimjaw [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

- Can you make it check & prevent it from adding a player to its own list (eg: prevent Mark from being added to Marks own friends list, when it was copied over from Janes list). This occurs when people play on shared/friends toons, and then also have that toon on their friends lists, thus having both a friend entry and also a friend list for that toon.

This sounds like a good idea, I'll add this to the list of enhancements.

Thanks for the feedback! It's always interesting to hear how other people make use of a tool in different ways.

[salimoneus]

Minor change - now using more distinct colors when update needed

[salimoneus]

To clear up some confusion about the friends count and how that works, here is a screen showing where the friends total was moved to (title bar):


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Since there are more than 100 friends between the 2 toons I have selected, if I try to do an Update it will pop a messagebox telling me I need to delete some and bring the total to 100 or less:


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To make it more clear, whenever there are over 100 combined friends I could probably change the background color of the friends list to something else to indicate an error condition, perhaps Red. Right now there is just White (all files in sync) and Yellow (files out of sync).

I'll play around with this a bit and get an update in.

[salimoneus]

Updated list with red background to indicate too many combined friends:


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