Been fooling around a lot with Destiny API lately. It’s been an experiment in strangeness, to say the least.  It has been a little difficult to work with, but only because at my office (where I do my thinking) the API Documentation is blocked (because Games are the devil at schools) which makes it tricky to figure out what data I need to provide in order to get the data I want (like having to provide a Platform ID and a Character ID in order to get number of kills).

That being said, it’s a learning exercise for objects and classes in PHP, which is fun.  It’s certainly a good distraction from the clusterfuck that is American Politics today.

The endpoints are all listed here.

Important things to note: You need to supply a header of “X-API-Key” with an API Key that you get from Bungie’s Developer Site.  You can get one here.

Other important tools: use hurl.it to make cURL requests via a web browser to test your API calls and see what happens with the data.  You will need to set the header, which is an option hurl.it supports.

Here’s a snippet of some of my code, which will get published to GitHub once I am happy with it.

private function askAPI($query){
    if(strlen($query)>0){
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$query);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array('X-API-Key: '.$this->apiKey));
        $json = json_decode(curl_exec($ch));
        if(gettype($json)=="NULL"){
            // If we get no data, clearly there's something wrong.
            throw new Exception("Fatal Error.  Status Code A1: Bad Query For API.");
            unset($json);
            unset($ch);
        }
        $errorCode = $json->ErrorCode;
        $errorStatus = $json->ErrorStatus;
        $errorMessage = $json->Message;
        if($errorCode>1){
            throw new Exception(sprintf("Fatal Error.  Status Code A2: Bad Destiny API Call, Error %s with Status %s, Message %s",$errorCode,$errorStatus,$errorMessage));
            unset($json);
            unset($ch);
        }
        else{
            return($json);
            unset($json);
            unset($ch);
        }
    }
    else{
        throw new Exception("Fatal Error.  Status Code A3: No Query For API.");
        unset($json);
        unset($ch);
    }
}

Obviously there’s a lot going on here.  Make a request, check the request, check the input to make sure it’s decent, all to make sure we actually get some sort of JSON out.  Phew.

private function getMemberID($platform="PS",$account="VGATalon"){
	if($platform=="PS"){
			$platformid=2;
	}
	elseif($platform=="XBOX"){
			$platformid=1;
	}
	else{
			throw new Exception("Fatal Error.  Status Code M1: Invalid / No Platform Specified.");
	}
	$query = sprintf("https://www.bungie.net/Platform/Destiny/SearchDestinyPlayer/%s/%s/",$platformid,$account);
	try{
			$data=$this->askAPI($query);
	}
	catch (Exception $e){
			throw new Exception("Fatal Error.  Status Code M2: ".$e);
	}
	try{
			$membershipID = $data->Response[0]->membershipId;
	}
	catch (Exception $e){
			throw new Exception(sprintf("Fatal Error.  Status Code M3: Could Not Find User %s on Platform %s",$account,$platform));
	}
	return($membershipID);
}

This is another step of the process, where we need to get the membership ID of a person. This is based on which platform they use (Xbox or PS) and their character name. It’s a simple lookup.  It returns the membership ID in a string format for us to use elsewhere.

There’s lots more to the process, including getting a character ID and then getting data about the character.

More of the examples will come to follow, as I continue developing the project.

I just wanted you to know that’s what the focus of my next bit of posts was going to be about.

I think I’m going to expand and make a Character an object instead of passing it around in terms of character IDs.

Food for thought.

-M, out.