Add item names Item/Recipe responses

#1 - May 20, 2013, 2:19 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Hi guys! First off, thanks for this, it’s awesome.

I’d suggest adding item names to the response output for the item and recipe queries, either by default or gated by an extra parameter. Mostly because with the current response output, any lookup I imagine (e.g. for a recipe) will immediately be followed by n lookups to the item_details to get the names of all the items involved, which a) slows things down, and b) increases load for you guys — unless everyone caches those locally which brings up other issues.

something like:
items.json?names=1
response: {[ {id=5613, name=“Tiny Scale”}, {id=5614, name=“Small Scale”}, ….]}
(similar for recipes.json)

recipe_details.json?names=1 —> add “output_item_name” at the top level, and then “name” inside each ingredient record.

That way you can get human-readable output from a single query without needing to do fetches for each individual id to figure out what they mean…

#2 - May 20, 2013, 2:28 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Basically it sounds like you want a bulk API for lookup.

That’s a reasonable request, though I’d ask that you try the API in its current form as bulk APIs come with a number of extra complexities.

In testing, we found that using multiple threads and HTTP pipelining we were able to download the entire database of information from the API very quickly.