Researched the options first. PriceCharting is the standard for retro prices
but requires a paid subscription for both its API and its bulk download.
eBay's sold-price data sits behind the Marketplace Insights API, which is a
limited release closed to new developers. The free game-price APIs cover
current digital storefronts, not physical retro copies. So there is no free
route to sold prices, and this uses eBay Browse — active listings, which are
asking prices, labelled as such rather than presented as valuations.
Schema now holds three prices per game (loose, CIB, new), with marketValue
as whichever tier matches that copy's condition. Changing a condition
re-prices from the stored tiers with no further lookup, and the dashboard
can later show both actual value and what a collection would be worth
complete.
The judgement lives in classification and aggregation, both pure and both
tested without credentials:
* listings are sorted into tiers from their titles, and accessories,
reproductions and multi-game lots are discarded — a "box only" listing
at $45 counted as a copy would halve the loose estimate for a $130 cart
* the discard qualifier is required. The first version matched a bare
"box", which threw out "complete in box" and "with box and manual",
i.e. most of the CIB tier, while keeping exactly the listings the
filter existed to remove. A test asserting on tiers rather than counts
caught it.
* median with an interquartile trim, since one optimist asking 50x moves
a mean and not a median
* sample counts travel with the estimate, because a tier drawn from two
listings warrants less confidence than one drawn from thirty
Credentials are optional: with none set, /api/prices/status reports
configured=false and refresh answers 503 with instructions, while the rest
of the app is unaffected.
101 backend tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rating, notes, condition, region, purchase price and date, plus a market
value carrying the timestamp and source that make it interpretable.
Condition is load-bearing rather than cosmetic: price feeds quote per
condition, so it selects which quoted price applies to a copy. Market value
records when it was captured and where it came from — a collection total is
only as good as its staleness — and an edit to an unrelated field leaves
that timestamp alone, so a stale price cannot start looking freshly checked.
Two storage decisions worth naming:
* Money is stored as integer minor units. SQLite has no decimal type and
EF Core maps decimal to TEXT, which compares lexically: "9.00" sorts
above "10.00" and SUM is unavailable. A value converter keeps decimals
in C# while ordering and totalling work. A test pins the ordering.
* Enums serialise as names. The default is ordinals, which meant the API
rejected the browser's {"condition":"Cib"} with a 400 while the C# tests
passed, because they round-tripped ints and never spoke the client's
dialect. The tests now share the API's serializer options.
Also fixes a data-loss bug in the Python tools. Both built their PUT body
from a hardcoded list of field names, so any column added to the model was
omitted and therefore nulled. Adding collector fields meant the next art or
enrichment run would have erased every rating, note, condition, price and
valuation in the library. Payloads are now built by excluding the handful of
server-owned fields, so new columns carry through by default.
The migration was rehearsed against a copy of the live database before being
applied: 105 rows, descriptions and developers intact.
67 backend tests, 8 frontend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The only backup was the Docker volume. Export writes the caller's whole
library as JSON or CSV; import reads either back, into the same account or
a different one.
Rows are matched on title + system rather than id, so a file is portable
between accounts and instances, and the same game on three consoles stays
three entries. Merge adds and updates but deletes nothing. Replace wipes
first, and is gated behind an explicit confirm dialog in the UI. dryRun
reports what would happen and writes nothing.
CSV is hand-rolled rather than pulling a dependency, but handles the parts
that actually bite: quoted fields containing commas, escaped quotes,
embedded newlines and CRLF endings. That is not hypothetical here — 101 of
the 105 descriptions contain newlines, and two titles contain accents, so a
naive split-on-comma would corrupt most of the library. Exports carry a BOM
so Excel reads them as UTF-8.
Verified against the real library, not just fixtures: 105 games exported to
CSV, imported into a scratch account and re-exported compare identical
field for field.
15 new tests cover round-trip fidelity, merge vs replace, dry run,
per-user isolation on the destructive path, malformed input, and the
awkward-quoting case. 51 backend tests total.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The API had no tests. These run against the real application through
WebApplicationFactory — same pipeline, same Identity configuration, same JWT
validation — with only the SQLite file, upload folder and signing key
swapped, so a passing test says something about what ships.
The ownership tests pin the rule the old PHP API got wrong: a second user
sees an empty library, gets 404 (not 403, which would confirm the id exists)
when reading, updating or deleting someone else's game, and cannot reassign
ownership by putting ownerId or userId in the request body.
Also covered: the password policy, that login is indistinguishable between a
wrong password and an absent user, that the availability endpoint leaks no
row data, that a token signed with an untrusted key is refused, that the
sort parameter is allow-listed rather than interpolated, and that uploads
must decode as an image regardless of extension or content type.
36 tests, ~1s. Program is now declared public partial so the test host can
reach it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ckochandClaude Opus 5