Recreate trello board state using API given a date in past

Question

Hi -

I'm trying to recreate a trello board state from a date in the past for some board metrics. I'm only interested in which list a card is in on this date. Is there a simple way to do this from the API?

At the moment I'm resorting to replaying all the card & list actions that create/move cards and lists over a simple dictionary of cards but I dont think I've caught all the possible actions that could create/move cards around as they dont tally with the current board positions if I run through the entire history (and I end up with lists that dont exist on my board anymore)

So the other question would be what action types should I be looking for to catch all card events necessary? Currently I'm looking at: updateCard:idList, updateCard:closed, createCard, deleteCard, updateList:closed, moveListFromBoard, moveListToBoard.

Thanks

Marcus

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Marcus Williams The only action I can see missing from that list is emailCard and moveCardFromBoard.

Also are you sure there are less than 1000 actions total returned from the endpoint? As in the count of all_actions < 1000 right after you make the query?

Also, when the board was created, was it copied from another board that had cards already in it? I'm not sure if those cards would show up as actions when copying a board (might, but haven't tested).

Also, there are actually differences in how actions are stored/retrieved via the API vs passed on to webhooks so while I'm confident that, for example, moveListToBoard will not only create a webhook notification for the list but also for each card in the list, I'm not confident that you would see the moveCardToBoard action for each card in the list, in the actions nested resource. It might be worth checking that out with a little test case.

Speaking of test cases, have you tried testing this out on a board with fewer actions to make sure you can get an accurate tally?

If you did this in a small test case, then you could experiment and see if there were any ways you could "fool" it for example by moving lists to the board etc.

Marcus Williams_jjs6fq · Answer

Ok, so removing everything else and only looking at card actions a count still doesnt tally with whats on the board if I recreate from history. The simplified code (python) is this:

auth = {'key': API_KEY, 'token': OAUTH_TOKEN, 'filter': 'all', 'limit': 1000}
api_endpoint = 'https://api.trello.com/1/boards/XXXXXXX/actions'
r = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=auth)
all_actions = r.json()
all_actions.reverse() # earliest action first

c = 0
for a in all_actions:
  if a['type'] == 'updateCard':
    if 'listBefore' in a['data']:
      # card move (ignore for count as they move on same board)
      pass
    elif 'closed' in a['data']['old']:
      # card archived/unarchived
      if a['data']['card']['closed']:
        c = c - 1
      else:
        c = c + 1
  elif a['type'] == 'deleteCard':
    # card deleted
    c = c - 1
  elif a['type'] == 'createCard' or a['type'] == 'moveCardToBoard' or \
       a['type'] == 'copyCard' or a['type'] == 'convertToCardFromCheckItem':
    # new card created in some way
    c = c + 1

There are less than 1000 actions so I'm not missing any as far as I can tell.

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Marcus Williams hmm, if instead of actually creating and removing the cards etc. you just increment and decrement a counter to indicate the difference between total card creation events versus card removal events, do you get the correct number? Just wanting to eliminate the prospect that somehow the actual operations to create/remove cards are failing.