Creating a new "spreadsheet"

Back in October, I wrote about redoing my "spreadsheet" for weighing gear choices. However, despite writing, I never did any further work on it.

I'm thinking, though, it's time to rectify that.

So far I've been using Vontre's spreadsheet for DPS calculations. I've looked at the numbers from maxdps.com but I really wonder about the usefulness of them. And, admittedly, I'm not entirely sure how to use them. (For example, I'm not really convinced that Mantle of Ill Intent is better than Mantle of the Elven Kings for raiding.)

So it's time to redo my "spreadsheet." I won't call it "pain" again since that's just silly. But I don't know what to call the new one yet.

I've started doing some preliminary work. I have some equation work done in my notebook that I'll transcribe at a future point in time.

One of the major things for this project is going to be generating a list of items available for selection. To assist with that, I have modified the Warcraft Armory Drupal module. (This is what populates the database and lets me link items like Robe of the Archmage.)

The way this module works is it scans the Armory and downloads the tooltip XML for items. It then passes the XML through the XSL style sheet from the Armory and uses that to store the tooltip HTML. Since the XML is the raw item data and very useful for this project, I have changed the module to also store the XML in the database as well as the transformed HTML.

The next step for this leg of the project is to write an XML parser for the item definitions to generate an item list. I'm hoping I can find some already existing code to base my effort off of -- but, if I have to, I can make my own solution from scratch, I'm sure.