Lego web services

RandoBogus

I am just emerging from the dark ages and am simply amazed by how the information age has complemented Lego. I absolutely love the capabilities of Brickset and Rebrickable, and as a database programmer I'd love to tinker with the data even more. For the fun of it I thought I might write a little windows app to run custom queries and explore new ideas.

I see in the visio diagram that brickset primarily gets its parts info/inventories from the official lego support site.

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but is this done through some official web service provided by Lego, or does Brickset just screen-scrape webpages like this? If not, I'll probably use Rebrickable's web service, but I thought I'd ask here first.

Huw

The LEGO API Brickset uses is not public and LEGO has taken steps to make it difficult to use.

You need considerable technical nous to work out how to use it, more than I have in fact: one of the other webmasters showed me how.

If a lot of people that use it and word of its use becomes widespread there's obviously a danger that LEGO will take steps to obfuscate it even more so for that reason I won't be revealing any details.

However, the data I extract from it, and some other value added stuff, can be downloaded from here: http://brickset.com/exportscripts/parts

Rebrickable's won't be the 'raw' data because they cleanse, correct and add to the data, so that might be better, depending on what you intend to do with it.

RandoBogus

Thanks much! I can definitely respect that :)

I think I'll stick to Rebrickable's service then since it is public, and as you suggest is more accurate in some senses. But it's also nice to have the parts dump you use so thank you much for that as well. Cheers!