User:STUART/WebAPI

Things that should be fixed in the Steam Web API system

• JSON and VDF should use arrays rather than objects containing arrays. Having them structured differently from XML complicates code unnecessarily (and result.items.item[1] looks stupid compared to results.items[1]). Nobody in JSON cares about the class name (since it's all just indices to JSON), and anybody using VDF is using code that was written for the original data file, which is structured this way.

Short version: this

 "result": {
   "status": 1,
   "items": {
     "item": [
       {
         "id": 18446744073709019323,
         "defindex": 125,
         "level": 1,
         "quality": 3,
         "inventory": 2149580806,
         "quantity": 1
       },
       {
         "id": 1029705,
         "defindex": 36,
         "level": 5,
         "quality": 3,
         "inventory": 2147483655,
         "quantity": 1
       },
     ]
   }
 }

should look like this:

 "result": {
   "status": 1,
   "items": [
     {
       "id": 18446744073709019323,
       "defindex": 125,
       "level": 1,
       "quality": 3,
       "inventory": 2149580806,
       "quantity": 1
     },
     {
       "id": 1029705,
       "defindex": 36,
       "level": 5,
       "quality": 3,
       "inventory": 2147483655,
       "quantity": 1
     },
   ]
 }

Methods that should be added to ITFItems_440

• A method that, for resources/tf_english.txt, returns what GetSchema does for scripts/items/items_game.txt. The latter's not very useful without the former as far as output is concerned.
• A method that returns the latest revision information for each of these, so systems know when they need to make the heavy call to GetSchema (and the hypothetical method that returns language data).

Things that should be added to the next version of GetSchema

• The revision number, so systems can compare it (for stored data) against the latest revision (as described above).
• The defindex of attributes for items, rather than the attribute's name and class. If GetPlayerInventory uses defindex for its attributes, GetSchema should too.

Things that should change in future versions of GetPlayerInventory

• Ditch the "quantity" field. With a unique ID on the item, how can this be anything but 1?
• Separate the "inventory" field into an "inventory_slot" value and "equipped" object (with a "true" for each class the item is equipped for, and empty if no classes have the item equipped). This is a Web API: consumers shouldn't have to do binary operations to get at data.