Pull Lichess and Chess.com games

[Hekkta]

Pawn appetite has a fantastic feature where you enter your lichess/chess.com username and it pulls your games for analysis. This would be very useful and would save having to constantly download a large pgn to then update your scid database.

It would be nice to be able to label the "event" or "site" of these games as "lichess" or "ches.com" so that they could be easily filtered in/out.

Here are some images of how it works:

[whelanh]

I've implemented your great idea. There are now two new options under the "File" menu: "Import my Lichess" and "Import my chess.com" The Lichess one downloads all your games. Chess.com only allows you to download a month at a time, so scidCommunity asks for the start year and then downloads every month automatically from January of that year to the current month. I've tested it on my Windows VM and it seems to work fine. But as always, your testing is appreciated. The new functionality is available in the latest release v5.1.1.61

[Hekkta]

That was quick, I'm impressed!

I've given it a go and it works well for me.

I'd suggest two adjustments (if they're possible):

1. Some kind of loading bar or count for how many games have been downloaded from the total, pawn appetite uses a blue bar when you download them.

At the minute it takes about 5-10 minutes to download my ~7000 games and the window goes into a "window not responding" state which is a bit jarring.

2. Again, on Pawn appetite there's a clever tracker for how many games are already downloaded. This means that when you next click download, it only grabs the games that already aren't in your database. this makes for a much quicker/smoother experience after the initial long download.

I realise this is a bit tricky, since they have a dedicated place for the lichess games and can compare your online games with that to find the difference whereas here on scid we have a games list which might be merged with another database and therefore difficult to find the games. So I'm not sure how this would best be accomplished. I suppose either it keeps a dedicated "lichess" and "chess.com" database that it can check against (maybe if there's a file with lichess_games.pgn it just updates that). Or it searches the current database for already downloaded games against the list of games on lichess/chess.com and only downloads the missing games.

As it stands this functionality is very useable, these aren't necessary points but would be nice.

[whelanh]

Those are good suggestions (and I'm impressed with your 7,000 games!). I will see about a progress bar as a first step. It does look to me like Pawn Appetite maintains dedicated chess.com and lichess databases for the user. I wasn't sure I wanted to go that way as a user (like me) with far fewer games might just want to use the Database Switcher window to import their chess.com/Lichess games into their main database. Pawn Appetite does have a nice interface there.

You could easily create your own chess.com database (create new empty chessCom database using File/New) and then just drag your games in Database Switcher into the new empty database. Then when you next did an "Import my chess.com", you could give the current year as the start year and it would be a lot quicker. Then just drag the new games into your existing chessCom database. I could actually add a start month input as well so you wouldn't get duplication if you ran it in March and then again in September for example.

I didn't put a start year/month option for Lichess, but their API actually supports that, so I could add that for Lichess as well (it just didn't take very long to download my paltry number of games 😊).

[whelanh]

I added a month input to the "Import my chess.com" dialog and also added a progress bar that updates as you are downloading your games. I also added a date and month input to the "Import my Lichess" so you don't have to download your whole history every time. All available in the latest Release. I couldn't do a progress bar for Lichess because the whole file comes at once rather than having to cycle through months like chess.com. I'm going to mark this closed for now, but feel free to re-open if you wish.