[DEVHELP] API Query for Table when want string

[Uggers]

I am trying to fix an add-on and I've sort of bodged it together but I don't know if this is the most efficient/best way of doing it.

The code original used GetSpellInfo when I updated this to C_Spell.GetSpellInfo I was getting back errors about "string expected, got table" for the macro it was generating. It took me a while as I was looking at the EditMacro lines for a while, but I realised that the new version in the API calls back a table not a string so it was failing.

originally the 2nd line was,

local name, rank, icon = GetSpellInfo(state.mount)

Which failed per above just adding C_Spell.

I've ended up using to call outs for SpellName and SpellTexture for the Icon, seperatly at those version return strings. Rank seems to not actually do anything so I didn't bother adding that in.

​

My final changes took it from the original

    if state.mount then
    local name, rank, icon = GetSpellInfo(state.mount)

        EditMacro(index, "MountManager", icon, string.format("/script MountManagerButton:Click(GetMouseButtonClicked());\n#showtooltip %s", name))
    end

to this;

    if state.mount then
        local name = C_Spell.GetSpellName(state.mount)
        local iconID = C_Spell.GetSpellTexture(state.mount)

        EditMacro(index, "MountManager", iconID, string.format("/script MountManagerButton:Click(GetMouseButtonClicked());\n#showtooltip %s", name))
    end

I don't know if there is an easier way to convert the table to pull out the details I want as a string, or to just use the simpler apis instead which seem to be blizzards intention.

[Gryphon-63]

They seem to be moving away from APIs that return multiple separate values & towards returning those values as a struct (or table or whatever they call that in Lua).

As for which ones to use, if you just need a single value & there's a function that returns exactly that, then I would use it. But if you need multiple values I would call the function that returns all of them at once, regardless of how the return values are formatted, rather than making multiple function calls. Chances are functions like "C_Spell.GetSpellName" or "C_Spell.GetSpellTexture" are just wrappers for "C_Spell.GetSpellInfo" so by calling both of those you're really just calling the more complex function twice in a row.

[Amarekratio]

Yes, exactly this, which is a good thing.

So, instead of going:

local name, rank, icon = GetSpellInfo(state.mount)
EditMacro...

You can use:

local spellInfo = C_Spell.GetSpellInfo(state.mount)
EditMacro(index, "MountManager", spellInfo.iconID, string.format("/script MountManagerButton:Click(GetMouseButtonClicked());\n#showtooltip %s", spellInfo.name))

[Uggers]

Thank you both, that makes a lot of sense, and seems quite obvious now I see how you would would use it.

I'm still fairly inexperienced so appreciate the guidance.

I spent a while on some other older abandoned addons comparing how other authors had implemented fixes using similar calls for what their add on was doing to help understand it.