#1 - Aug. 10, 2011, 8:43 p.m.
The returned item data for a single item contains several IDs for which I can find no way other than brute force to relate them to actual data:
- stats are listed with just an id rather than "strength" or "mastery"
- item class, subclass, and inventory type are just ids
- set items have just an id for the set
For stats, item class, item subclass, and inventory type I can probably just use brute force to enumerate the possible values in a couple hours... but I was wondering if there are any plans to document these IDs, or is there documentation that someone can point me to?
The item set IDs would take much longer to do the same. Is there a way to get the item set name and set bonus descriptions?
When retrieving a character, a similar issue occurs: you can get enchant ids and random item suffix ids, but there appears to be no way to map these to the text associated with each. Is there a recommended approach to locating this information?
Our site requires this information because we need to load the full detail for items in order to read the stats and do fancy math to rank items and the such. At the moment we are reading the battle.net html for items, and the specified information above can easily be read out of the page content. But that will not be an option soon.
If the API has no plans to support this kind of extra information, a possible alternative would be for our site to continue using the battle.net html to get this particular information. The amount of traffic would be very low because we cache item information indefinitely -- it rarely changes. Does anyone know what kind of limits will be placed on reading battle.net html, i.e. would very small amounts of traffic be OK? For an example of the scale, if we clear our item cache because of a patch or content update, we might need to re-load a list of 1000 items once every couple of months. Would that be an acceptable usage of the battle.net html?
