EVE Technology Lab

Hi All,

I'm hoping someone can help me with the following problem. I'm pretty new to the API and parsing the XML output. I have managed to get the results I need from the rest of the API calls I'm making but I'm getting stuck with the AllianceList Xml. For those who have not looked at this monster XML file, here's a hugely truncated example to show the layout of it:

(Angle braces removed from xml example)
=======================================================================================

eveapi version="2"
    currentTime 2015-09-09 12:39:58 /currentTime
    result
         rowset name="alliances" key="allianceID" columns="name,shortName,allianceID,executorCorpID,memberCount,startDate" 
             row name="Goonswarm Federation" shortName="CONDI" allianceID="1354830081" executorCorpID="1344654522" memberCount="14001" startDate="2010-06-01 05:36:00" 
                 rowset name="memberCorporations" key="corporationID" columns="corporationID,startDate" 
                     row corporationID="98000377" startDate="2015-09-01 04:35:00"/ 
                     row corporationID="98002506" startDate="2014-11-12 22:20:00"/ 
                     row corporationID="98007214" startDate="2012-01-28 05:36:00"/ 
                     row corporationID="98008630" startDate="2010-12-20 19:40:00"/ 
                     row corporationID="98014536" startDate="2011-01-16 15:45:00"/ 
                    etc...
                 /rowset 
             /row 
             row name="Brave Collective" shortName="BRAVE" allianceID="99003214" executorCorpID="98199293" memberCount="12464" startDate="2013-05-06 22:20:14" 
                 rowset name="memberCorporations" key="corporationID" columns="corporationID,startDate" 
                 row corporationID="1818800266" startDate="2015-01-14 00:43:00"/ 
                 row corporationID="1857499356" startDate="2013-12-28 23:06:00"/ 
                 row corporationID="781729299" startDate="2013-12-10 22:55:00"/ 
                etc...
             /rowset 
             /row 
            etc...
         /rowset 
     /result 
     cachedUntil 2015-09-09 13:11:51 /cachedUntil 
 /eveapi

=======================================================================================

...My problem is that I have written a script that pulls just the alliance info from the "alliances" rowset and that works great. However, I can't seem to get the "memberCorporations" data from it's rowset. I am using simplexml to parse the api feed but can't seem to access the member corp info. The (working) script I have written is:

//Retrieve the MASSIVE AllianceList.xml file and parse it.
$alinfo = simplexml_load_file('https://api.eveonline.com/Eve/AllianceList.xml.aspx');

//get alliance info
foreach($alinfo->result->rowset[0] as $row){
    $alnm = $row['name'];
    $shnm = $row['shortName'];
    $alid = $row['allianceID'];
    $exid = $row['executorCorpID'];
    $meco = $row['memberCount'];
    $stdt = $row['startDate'];
    $cpid = $row['corporationID'];
    
    //echo results for now...
    echo' '.$alnm.' '.$shnm.' '.$alid.' '.$exid.' '.$meco.' '.$stdt.' '.$cpid.' ';
}

This displays the alliance info (i am echoing at the moment as I am still testing it but eventually the script will insert the info into a mySQL DB table. The (non-working) script is a variation of the alliance one:

//get member corp info
foreach($alinfo->result->rowset[1] as $mem){
    $corpID = $mem['corporationID'];
    $joined = $mem['startDate'];
    
    //echo results for now...
    echo''.$corpid.' '.$joined.'';
}

I am assuming that since the member corp info is on a different rowset that the rowset index is [1]. However, this doesn't seem to work. i have tried other ways of getting this info (xpath etc) but would like to keep things simple for now. What is it that I need to do with the script to make it work? When I var_dump the $alinfo variable, the array contains the corp info but I can't access it -help, it's doing my head in! :(

Do it inside the first loop where it'll be $row->rowset[0].

Thanks, I'll give that a whirl :)

Why are you parsing it yourself in the first place?
Use PhealNG, don't be a scrub. It handles all the boring stuff. Moreover, it also supports local result caching so you never hit the limit.

Library itself: https://github.com/3rdpartyeve/phealng
Symfony2 Bundle: https://github.com/EvELabs/EvelabsPhealNGBundle

In this case i suggest you read about Xpath.

http://php.net/manual/en/simplexmlelement.xpath.php
http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_simplexml_xpath.asp
http://www.dimuthu.org/blog/2008/09/30/xpath-in-simplexml/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/

So basically, you use Xpath to navigate to the element or even subtree and then work with them instead of having to work with entire document.

Also there is shorter version of AllianceList endpoint available: https://api.eveonline.com/eve/AllianceList.xml.aspx?version=1

Thank-you both for the advice (and links), It's much appreciated :) I will look further into xpath and Yapeal as I progress....