Field Test Results

Last night's D&D game was the first opportunity I've had to test my app in a real-world situation: at the table, with people asking questions about rules, powers and items.

It went very well, and in addition to helping us work out exactly what a Woundpatch does, I managed to find a couple of bugs - both in the DnD 4e Compendium and the Wizards.com API.

One of the recent changes I've made is to allow filtered searches to find unlevelled results - items and powers that don't have a required level for using them; like race or class abilities or the Adventurer's Kit. I'd made a slight error when coding that bit though, which resulted in the inability to view any Power results.

Another issue I discovered is that the Wizards API, when running a simple keyword search or a filter search (with no filters provided) has an indication of whether the item is available publicly as a teaser, or if you'll need a D&D Insider account to view the full compendium entry. I was hoping to use that to provide an indication in the app, but if you do pass filters for a search it's marking everything as requiring an Insider account. So, that particular feature is going to be boxed indefinitely, since I can't get it to work consistently without some changes on Wizards' end.

I've also made some changes to the way results are displayed: a simple search now only lists the types that have results, and any filtered or type results with a level value now display that next to their entry instead of the source name.

There's some more testing to do over the coming days, but I'm still hopeful that the next version will be available for download this weekend.