Allow linking to starting a chat from either a loaded character or trigger loading

From my Character Browser I can only link them to the character card at Venice.AI. I would like to be able to link them to a page that either finds the “stock” character in their loaded characters and starts a new chat, or loads the character from the server and then starts a chat.

Unfortunately, I don’t see anything different between the originally imported character and a copy of that character (either intentionally or accidentally) that we can key off. The character has an “IsImported” flag, but I have never seen a character with this flag set to “true”. I assumed this would indicate a character that was directly downloaded from Venice.AI but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There is also a “publicId” field that I’ve never seen be anything but null.

So, for the duplicate character function I would:

If the character is public (IsImported is true) then I would:

Duplicate the character.

Copy the SourceId => PublicId on the duplicate

Generate a new SourceId GUID for the duplicate

Set the IsImported to false on the duplicate.

If the character is not public, I would just generate a new SoureceId GUID.

It the user edits a character marked IsImported, then I would act as if they copied it above.

Now I would create a new endpoint to start a chat that takes the SourceId of the character (which will now be guaranteed to be the original public character). If the SourceId is not found, then it would download the character from the server and then start a chat (the functionality of the chat button on the existing character sheet).