Professions -> Weapons not an array?

[blobfish.6712]

Hello,

Looking at the api documentation here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:2/professions it says that "weapons" is supposed to be an array ("weapons (array of objects)"). If i look at an actual request, for example: https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/professions/Engineer the weapon array is sent like this: "weapons": {...} when it should be "weapons":[{...}, {...}, ...] or am I misunderstanding something?

[darthmaim.6017]

The wiki is wrong. It's an object with the possible weapons as keys.

[Archomeda.6472]

I've fixed it. Thanks for noticing!

[blobfish.6712]

Would it not be better to just put the weapons in an array instead though, how come ArenaNet chose this approach instead?

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

@blobfish.6712 said:Would it not be better to just put the weapons in an array instead though, how come ArenaNet chose this approach instead?

Probably not. Enumerating the direct properties of a JSON Object is trivial, and it binds the name and value in a way that is popular. (I mean, personally, I strongly prefer fully internal data, so I agree with you, but ... this is a popular choice, and it does work.)

If you prefer an array of objects, simply use some variant of the code:

var result = new Array()for (var key in <weapons>) {    var weapon = <weapons>[key]    weapon.name = key    result.push(weapon)}// et viola

[blobfish.6712]

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Probably not. Enumerating the direct properties of a JSON Object is trivial, and it binds the name and value in a way that is popular. (I mean, personally, I strongly prefer fully internal data, so I agree with you, but ... this is a popular choice, and it does work.)

If you prefer an array of objects, simply use some variant of the code:

var result = new Array()for (var key in <weapons>) {    var weapon = <weapons>[key]    weapon.name = key    result.push(weapon)}// et viola

The problem this approach brings to me is that the library i use (newtonsoft.json) can't de-serialize the weapons into a dictionary of type <string, Weapon>(at least i couldn't get it to). This means i have to make a big ugly class containing one JsonProperty per weapon and then i have to check which ones has been initialized. This will also be a problem for me when they add new weapons and i then have to add those to the "Weapons" class.