README

This is a collection of perl scripts that make use of wow.realmpop.com and Blizzard's WoW character API to generate a database of characters and any craftable items they can create. Once you have a populated database, you can query it to find out who can craft a particular item on your realm.

NOTES

Blizzard's "legacy" API documentation is here.

Blizzard has a new API and website - dev.battle.net.

As of 2nd December 2014 this project is using the new API, which requires an API key. The old API will be removed in early 2015.

FEATURES COMPLETE

• Grab data from realmpop's json blobs and put it into database
• Save recipe-character data in database
• Mark characters as dormant/deleted etc

TODO LIST

Functionality:

• Need to figure out what information should be stored in the database - schema review

Other:

Secondary goals:

• character discovery through examining each char's guild/looking up their guild members (this could be run on another server to avoid the API limit!)

• add compatibility stuff for other SQL DBs? I'm using postgres for personal preference/it was already installed on this VM.

• move functions out into module, fix up bad coding practice, etc.

Database speed can be improved by following this guide - Tuning your Postgres Server. I was able to get 20k rows inserted per second running on a dedicated server, and about 15k rows/second on a VM at home. UPDATE: with the new schema using split tables, inserts are up to 80k rows a second and queries seem to be instant!

"The character and guild API resources do honor HTTP requests that contain the "If-Modified-Since" header." <- put a last-checked timestamp in characters table and use that for requests to save on processing time (and be nice to the api, whom we love so much)

How do I get set up?

• Install perl, any perl dependencies, and postgresql
• Sign up to blizzard's API thing at dev.battle.net to get a key, and put that key into conf.pl as $api_key.
• use init_db.sql to create the database and user, and set permissions (edit the file if you want to change the DB/user name/password, and add that user/password to conf.pl)
• use reset_db.sql to create the necessary tables (you can also run this to clear all data from the database)
• Run init_db.pl to grab data out of wow.realmpop.com and store it in the database
• run api_grabber.pl to use the grabbed data to start querying the blizzard API

Perl Dependencies

• File::Slurp
• DBI and DBD::Pg
• JSON and JSON::XS
• AnyEvent and AnyEvent::HTTP
• EV (although you can comment out the use EV line and AnyEvent should use its own event handler)