On farming the Armory

After reviewing the results returned from the modified Warcraft Armory module, I discovered that the XML returned for the item tooltips (item-tooltip.xml) does not include the item level. This annoyed me slightly since this is information I want to have available in the gear database.

After some investigation, I found that an item's item level (ilevel) is in the XML for the item information page (item-info.xml). So I modified the module again to download item-info.xml for items that are found in addition to item-tooltip.xml. This will make the ilevel available for when I start building the database.

Having done some preliminary poking at the tooltip XML, it seems that some of it is pretty vague. Of course, it helps to remember that scraping the Armory in this fashion is not exactly supported by Blizzard and there is no web services interface or the like to allow for ease of retrieval.

Here's an example of some confusing XML: (From item 25970, Shalassi Oracle's Sandals)

<overallQualityId>3</overallQualityId>
<bonding>1</bonding>

So what's this supposed to mean anyway?

After digging through http://www.wowarmory.com/layout/item-tooltip.xsl, the XSL style sheet used to transform the item tooltip XML into HTML, it turns out that overallQualityId refers to the quality/rarity of the item and that bonding refers to the binding status. In this example, we find that an overallQualityId of 3 means the item is blue (rare) and that a bonding of 1 means that the item is bind on pickup.

I can sense this becoming some sort of headache.

One thing that may help with building the item database is code posted by Kaliban of wow-loot.com fame on the World of Warcraft forums. It's in PHP and it's not pretty but it looks like it should take most of the digging work out of the picture. I'm sure, however, this is still going to be a pain.