Timeline for Can't get JSON representation for the help
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 1, 2010 at 7:37 | comment | added | Sky Sanders | Jeff- stackapps.com/questions/386/… , stackapps.com/questions/409/… and more on the way - this is why it would be very useful. | |
| May 27, 2010 at 19:55 | comment | added | Greg Bray | Looks like I spoke too soon... the api.stackoverflow.com/0.8/help/method?method=stats version of the help page does use CSS and ID tags and should be much easier to parse. | |
| May 27, 2010 at 19:43 | comment | added | Greg Bray | I could see a use for consuming the help file in a JSON format when creating a library or wrapper. Rather than re-type or copy and paste all the method descriptions you could pull down the help page and use code templates to prototype the method bodies with full documentation. I was planning on doing this by parsing the current HTML help pages, but while the HTML is very clean it does not use element IDs or CSS classes to annotate the methods very well so it is not very easy to scrape content from those pages. | |
| May 25, 2010 at 9:32 | comment | added | systempuntoout | I think this should be added. I was thinking to build a Playground Stack WebApp that automatically retrieves all the methods available of a given API version, and let you play with them. Without the JSON representation help you don't have a valid entry-point to reach all the API methods automatically. | |
| May 25, 2010 at 0:32 | comment | added | Franci Penov | I was thinking about building a console-type app, that uses the JSON representation of the help for autocomplete and for showing a plain text help in the app. Another scenario would be automatic proxy building against newer version of the API. In general, a JSON representation of the help can help with any scenarios where one needs automated API discovery/enumeration, kind of like a JSON WSDL. | |
| May 25, 2010 at 0:25 | history | answered | Jeff Atwood | CC BY-SA 2.5 |