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Raw deltas export

To support importing wave data from wave.google.com to your own wave server, we have added an option to the ROBOT_FETCH_WAVE method in the Wave Data API (see example below) to get the raw deltas from a wavelet. These raw deltas provide the wave's complete history. They're exported "as-is" and we expect there will be a little work to postprocess them into a form suitable for import into your own wave server.

You can try it out the new raw deltas option as follows:

First, authenticate with OAuth to get an access token. You can do that at the OAuth Playground (http://googlecodesamples.com/oauth_playground/):
  • Choose your Scope(s): tick the Wave box
  • Modify the OAuth Parameters: select HMAC-SHA1 and enter "anonymous" in the two first fields, oauth_consumer_key and consumer secret
  • Follow steps 3-5 (using your googlewave.com account) to get the request token, authorize the roken, and finally get the access token which will be displayed in the request/response window. (If that window says invalid at any point along the way, retry from the beginning.) The access token has the form  oauth_token=1%2F...&oauth_token_secret=....
Download and unzip the python robot client library in a fresh directory with the commands:
curl -O http://wave-robot-python-client.googlecode.com/files/wave-robot-api-v2-20101202.zip
unzip wave-robot-api-v2-20101202.zip
start python in this directory and run the following commands:
import waveservice
w = waveservice.WaveService()
w.set_access_token("oauth_token=1%2F...&oauth_token_secret=...")  # the access token string from above
f = w.fetch_wavelet('googlewave.com!w+tYBKatJxA', raw_deltas_from_version=0)  # this wave is public
f.raw_deltas  # prints the base64 encoded raw deltas
The WaveService() method takes an optional use_sandbox=True argument, if you want to access waves from WaveSandbox.com. Replace the wave id above with the id of the wave which you want to export.

Each raw delta is returned as a base 64 encoding of the binary representation of  ProtocolAppliedWaveletDelta protocol buffer. You can use the ParseRawDelta program to parse the base 64 string. The deltas have no signatures and no history hashes.

Some caveats:
  • Because of the simplistic access control in the Data API, you can only export a wavelet on which you are an explicit participant or which is public (has public@a.gwave.com as participant).
  • You can only export conversation wavelets, not userdata wavelets.
  • Some old waves on WaveSandbox.com cannot be exported because they contain some bad legacy data in old deltas.
  • Each call returns at most X operations and at most Y MB of data. If you run up against these limits, make another call with raw_deltas_from_version set to the end version of the last delta returned.
FYI, we have also implemented a ROBOT_FETCH_WAVE option to return a raw snapshot of a wavelet. Unfortunately, the data is in an internal undocumented format and we may not be able to publish a specification for that, so please try to make do with the raw deltas, at least for now. 
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