Auction House API is live!

We're very pleased to announce that the first version of the Auction House API is now live - we have been hard at work on this for the last few weeks, and are looking forward to seeing what new and exciting applications spawn out of it!

As of right now, US and Europe are live and populating, and Korea will be following in a couple of days.

Please refer to the documentation at http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/#id3683980 for further information, and don't hesitate to post any thoughts on this thread.

Thank you for your patience!

{"auc":1347942360,"item":14344,"owner":"Sanctuary","bid":2041200,"buyout":2268000,"quantity":3},


It seems like "Time Left" is still not being included in the AH dump. I was under the impression that this was going to be modified on release, as per this thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2878699690

Is it possible to know if this is a bug or not?

Thanks! :)

It is indeed a bug and is planned for the next API deployment.

Looking to get the fix for this rolled out tomorrow - sneak preview of the format (docs to be updated when we push it):
timeLeft: "SHORT|MEDIUM|LONG|VERY_LONG"

Couple of replies (Thanks for the great feedback so far!):

@Vynz - This is most likely a minor web server tweak that we can get hooked up tomorrow.
@Ujournal - Point 1 - Will also look at getting the gzip compression hooked up tomorrow - file extension won't change, but it should get streamed as gzip :). Point 2 - We've been back and forth on this and may change it once we observe the live behavior - thats why its so important to read from the API call to get the filename, so we can change it at-will.

I can confirm that some of the json files are returning 404s when they shouldn't be. We'll look into it this morning.

@Lovepanda: You can expect an update approximately once an hour, but please go by what the API sends back to you as it will always be the source of truth.

@Ujournal, @Vynz: Content-type and gzip compression should both correctly work now on the json dumps - please retest.

@All: Json dumps should be consistently working correctly now - please let us know if you run into the same issue again.

@Ujournalh - Can you provide a sample URL that exhibits the behavior? We're having trouble duplicating it - the config changes that fixed this issue seem to be working correctly across all of our hardware correctly in the US at least.

@Opta: Yep - we've identified the issue with the charset not falling through to the default UTF-8 - we'll get this fixed ASAP.

@Aiur - the only field we're adding to the AH auction fragment is the 'timeLeft' value - the item icons will be available via the Item API when it is launched, and we are trying to minimize duplication/redundancy.

timeLeft has been pushed to US and EU and is in the process of updating to all realms now - in about an hour all exports should be finished.

Enjoy!

timeLeft has been added to ours but horde and neutral auctions are currently blank :)

http://us.battle.net/auction-data/zangarmarsh/auctions.json

The changes will be visible over time as the dump files are rebuilt.

08/03/2011 10:46 PMPosted by Laurabelle

Is there anything in the API to perhaps cull it down to only a specific item (or subset of items) from the AH listing, rather than the entire dump?

I believe the best course of action is to let the current features incubate for a little while. That way we can get some good mid to long term stats and information on how it is all being used and what issues, problems and work-arounds developers have to deal with.

08/04/2011 07:00 AMPosted by Aladan

Has it been discussed how many requests a registered application will likely be able to have?

Many times. Check some of the sticky threads.

08/03/2011 11:44 PMPosted by Chantee

Blizz just made it Christmas in August for this data visualization geek!

Oh you made my day.

I just manually verified this was not an issue by creating a temporary copy of the last hour's dump for Dath'Remar and comparing filesize and linecount with the latest dump - these are definitely different.

The auction logs for Dath'Remar do not seem to update.

The lastModified timer changes but when I download a new file as indicated by the URL, it is always the same file as before. The only time the file changed during the last 24 hours was when the timeLeft field was added.
Since then, the lastModified time has changed at least twice but the downloaded file has not.

08/05/2011 11:57 PMPosted by Sisk

Looks like the scheduling for auction house data is on a predictable timer. Come feeding time, we'll all try to pack in at once. Oooof. The troubles!

It only seems that way. Practically, there is no guarantee that a given realm will be processed at the same time each hour/period.

I just opened up that json and it has a lot of data in it - it was last updated at 16:22 UTC (9 minutes ago).

Nevertheless, this isn't the first report of this and we'll look further into it.

It could very well be because there is maintenance going on currently, however it seems that Emerald Dream is not displaying Alliance auctions again.
<a href="http://us.battle.net/auction-data/emerald-dream/auctions.json">http://us.battle.net/auction-data/emerald-dream/auctions.json</a>

The main reason I bring this up during maintenance is that it was happening last week outside of maintenance and could be the same issue (possibly non-maintenance related, that is).

Regarding the "???" names, this is a known issue where an unknown user (to the Armory) has posted an auction. This is typically when a newly created character's data has not reached the Armory yet, so the name is unable to be displayed. Once the data is delivered to Armory, future auctions by these characters should display correctly again.

The current Ursin US auction data json is malformed, causing PHP's json_decode to fail. Alliance auctions with the owner "kamala" have a tab 0x09 character before the owner's name. The tab character is a restricted control character that must be escaped within strings, according to json.org.

Just search for "kamala" in the file to find examples. Currently, auction IDs 1269006654, 1269172853, 1269006647, 1269006671 and others show this behavior.

We'll take a look at this - there should definitely NOT be restricted control characters in character names!