[Developers] Dumb Acre question of the day

[Jason Douglas]

On Jul 17, 2009, at 7:16 AM, Philip Kendall wrote:

> A probably dumb Acre question...

it's not

>
> Is there a way to get acre.freebase.mql{read,write} to use sandbox
> rather than the production graph? If so, how?

The official option is to just use the sandbox app editor:

	http://acre.sandbox-freebase.com

Which then runs apps on:

	http://*.sandbox-freebaseapps.com

However, I'm guessing that's not what you're asking... :-)   It's  
trickier than you'd think to run code that's stored in production but  
call APIs on sandbox.  There are several issues:
1. The code itself is retrieved via the Freebase APIs, so you have to  
be careful not to start trying to get the code from sandbox too (like  
in an acre.require)
2. The mwLastWriteTime cookie that controls the cache (whether you  
immediately see the results of a write in a read, for example) is not  
portable across graphs... and in fact, can cause very bad behavior if  
it is used against the wrong graph.
3. The authentication credentials necessary for a mqlwrite are not  
necessarily portable.

However, Alex (one of the Acre developers) just started working on a  
helper library right now that might be able to take care of all of  
this for you.  It's working for #1/2 now, but there's more work for  
#3.  Hopefully, we'll be able to post it later today.

-jason