API for 3rd-party tool integrations

[ericscheid]

Pinning a stub here for collecting nascent thoughts about facilitating 3rd-party tool integration.

See #1414, #1204, #1097, #809, #1532, #194, #162

• tools creating new brews (e.g. their tool confabulates a bunch of markdown for info they manage, they shunt that to HB as a brew)
• RSS feeds for watching tags / search terms
• editor-collaboration tools (since HB currently does a poor job of multi-user editing)

---

Examples of 3rd party tools that would be nice to build a pathway for..

• Eigengrau's Essential Establishment Generator
• Tetra-cube's Monster Generator
• Alex Schroeder's Hex_Describe
• Watabou's One Page Dungeon generator
• Fantasia Archive Integration with Fantasia Archive #1414
• Monster Builder - not yet public, see API for new brew #194

The first couple have already taken a step or two on that pathway (i.e. they generate the MD for either THB or GMB to copy/paste)

[G-Ambatte]

There is some discussion in older PRs where Scott talked about outside apps being able to push a JSON object to /api in order to create a new Brew in the HB database, however based on previous discussions with @calculuschild, my current understanding is that direct creation of brews in the database should be discouraged and/or disallowed, with external apps instead being able to create a new brew in an Editor window, where the user can save it to their account, print, or discard it at their discretion.
This was the thinking behind the /template Route (#1532) I created; the user is dropped into a NewPage editing environment, pre-populated with the parameters from the query. An issue with the implementation in that PR is that editing the data at /template will overwrite anything that the user has in localStorage from /new - user data may be lost in a way that is not obvious or intuitive.

[ericscheid]

Another possible 3rd party candidate is Watabou's One Page Dungeon generator (and village generator, and city generator, and hexmap generator).

Another is Alex Schroeder's generators (e.g. Hex_Describe et al).

[Gazook89]

More integrations...

• Tetra-cube's Monster Generator

• Table Generator

• https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/draw/#

• remove.bg or similar

Just spitballin

[ericscheid]

Tetra-cube's Monster Generator already has a "View Markdown" function (using legacy brew syntax) .. so that's an easy win (right now, their users would click that button and then wonder "what's a Hombrewery, where do I find that?")

Another interesting one is Eigengrau's Essential Establishment Generator which also already has an export function for THB, GMB, Foundry, and Raw JSON.

Both require the user to copy, navigate to THB, open a new brew, paste, save, edit etc.