[Development] Grabbing Armory Data and Icons

[StarI3lade]

'Alo Community

I'm a seasoned Flex (RIA) developer looking to create a web-based armory application via RIA and I'm interested in knowing how others have been successful at the following:

- Pulling armory data
- Retrieving icons (I presume these would be from a local MPQ file or the like)

It's not necessary that the implementation details be discussed using Flex but rather that a good explanation of how to retrieve the data is presented. In other words, the explanation can be technology agnostic. Here are some questions along the lines of what I'm wondering:

1) Are there web services available to hit for pulling armory data or do you have to get the data via some other means?

2) Where are the WoW icons stored and how can I retrieve them?

Thanks for your time!

EDIT: I was able to find the means to pull data from the OLD armory but I'm interested in pulling data for the new one. For those interested, the old armory URLs appeared as follows:

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#character-sheet/[server]/[character]

If you simply dropped the '#' prior to "character-sheet" you would be returned the XML data backing the armory page instead of HTML. The new armory doesn't work this way however.

[StarI3lade]

Lewl - 93 views and not a single reply .

What I wonder is how sites like ArenaJunkies are doing it right now using the new armory. Apparently Blizzard is going to be releasing an API for the armory that will simplify things but AJ has already got their new profile browsing in place using the new armory. Do you think Blizzard gave them early access to the API or are they taking the hard road and parsing the HTML returned for the time being until the API is released to the public?

[sitnspinlock]

Lewl - 93 views and not a single reply .

What I wonder is how sites like ArenaJunkies are doing it right now using the new armory. Apparently Blizzard is going to be releasing an API for the armory that will simplify things but AJ has already got their new profile browsing in place using the new armory. Do you think Blizzard gave them early access to the API or are they taking the hard road and parsing the HTML returned for the time being until the API is released to the public?

hey, this is a good question and I wish i could give you a good answer but i cant. I had something similar implemented into a morph tool that i wrote (which i didnt finish btw). just winsock api and html parsing. basically user enters their wowhead armory url, and since the items are stored by display id, which in case you didnt know are the same ids mapped in mpq archives, thus swapping those ids in WoW's virtual address space will render a new result. sorry im rambling.

the parser and data retrieval code i wrote was amateur and the overall process was painstakingly slow.

if you want a peek at my code or something just pm, but you seem like a smart one and you probably already know how ;p

edit-

oh yeh i forgot to add. those icons are in the same data string with an item display id, you will find it in the DBFilesClient section, within ItemDisplayInfo.dbc.

generally the data structure is formed like so,

display id - model path (item/bigsword.mdx) - some data - some more data - icon picture

something like that haha, its not exact but the icon pictures are linked with an item and its display id.

[ev1]

I'm a tad buzzed, but i googled parsing wow armory data without XML. I don't know if this is 100% effect for what you're doing, but if you know a bit of PHP:
http://kastang.com/blog/2010/12/pars...y-without-xml/