Internally, there is a distinction between commodities and “regular” items via unit_price versus buyout. We decided to keep this distinction in the API. While it may feel unnecessary currently (because the unit price is effectively a buyout price), this distinction:
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Signals whether or not an item is a commodity without bloating every returned item with an item type field. (We’re concerned with adding more fields than necessary to the Auctions endpoint because of how large auction dumps may become for high population realms.)
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Insulates the API from changes to commodity functionality that may occur.
We really appreciate the detailed feedback here, and we’re discussing this internally.
Thanks for the report!
You are correct. Every endpoint in the Game Data and Profile APIs returns a Last-Modified response header indicating when the document was last updated. This is particularly useful to determine the last updated time for profile and dynamic data (namespaced via profile-{region} or dynamic-{region} respectively) or when checking against static data that has been cached on your end (namespaced via static-{region}).
The Game Data and Profile APIs also support the If-Modified-Since request header, allowing you to avoid the download overhead if the document has been unmodified since the specified date. This is particularly useful when interacting with the Auction House API because response sizes may be rather large. See this reference for more information on the header.
We’re seeing a couple of issues in KR and TW, and we’re working on a fix:
- New Visions of N’zoth endpoints listed in the original announcement post returning a 403 Forbidden.
- Character profiles not updating properly on logout.
We’re aware of this and monitoring usage. If you notice any issues, please let us know!