Architecture

At first element43’s structure might seem a little intimidating to someone who is new to Django or similar frameworks. This document is for understanding the app’s basic structure. Each part has or will have its own, detailed documentation. Element43 is basically made up of three parts: the consumer the webapp and the pathfinding API.

Consumer

The consumer connects to EMDR’s data feed and stores market data into the tables prefixed with market_data_. The consumer also analyzes incoming data for suspicious orders and does some basic statistical processing to speed-up the main application. Currently there are two consumers available:

• A python based one located at element43/consumer

  • Documentation can be found here, too

• And a NodeJS based one which aims to be more efficient

Django Web App

This is the main part of element43. It handles all the functionality of displaying data, importing data from CCP’s API and authentication of users. In order to keep things clear and modular, element43 is divided into several apps of which each one is only performing a very specific set of tasks. This way every app has access to all the data stored in the database and some common functions without the code getting confusing.

Currently there are sixteen different apps in element43/webapp/element43/apps/:

App	Function
api	Handles EVE API imports and associated models. Does not actually render anything. Mainly contains Celery tasks and API models.
auth	Handles the registration, authentication and deactivation of expired accounts. Does not contain any models.
common	Renders all the basic templates like home and about. Also contains util.py with many useful shared functions.
dashboard	App for displaying the dashboard and character information once the user logged in.
legacy_api	Provides API functionality compatible with eve-central’s API
manufacturing	An advanced manufacturing calculator.
market_browser	Provides the market browser.
market_data	Element43’s core. Contains all market-data-related models as well as some helper functions, market history JSON generation and database maintenance tasks.
market_scanner	Contains the market scanners.
market_station	App for displaying station-related market info.
market_tradefinder	Contains a basic region-based tradefinder.
quicklook	Quicklook views for items and regions.
rest_api	The core of our REST API based on Django REST Framework.
rest_framework	REST API assets which have to reside here because of a limitation in Django REST Framework.
user_settings	Presents the user account settings. Allows for adding API keys, characters or changing profile information.
wallet	Displays wallet-specific information like the journal or transactions using the API models.
feedreader	Retrieves popular EVE-related RSS feeds for display on the dashboard.

See the model and database documentation for further information

Pathfinding

The pathfinding app provides a basic HTTP-based pathfinding API.