REST API Roadmap

Hey there, Looking for a few options here. Looking to develop a character repository for the games I DM where I would need read access to Roll20's Database for my PC characters. Really, the driving reason behind this, is that I use a projector on a table and a lot of my players prefer to have a physical character sheet in front of them instead of using roll20 to manage their characters. Because of this, keeping all my PCs up-to-date is a rather difficult task. Few ways I want to accomplish this: REST API (as I do not require a stateful connection to Roll20) and have a character encoded in either XML or JSON to which I can format on my own webserver and provide my players a choice where to export their characters (printable versions, back into Roll20, etc) Webhook through the Javascript API - an event listener through the current API that allows me to create a command and use a POST command to a server I control with the encoded character data. As automated as possible, without need for human intervention. Which leads me to ask the Roll20 community (and possibly the Devs) a few questions: Is the REST API still on the roadmap? Are there technical reasons why this hasn't happened? I really only need a GET on the API. What would be a painless way to do option 2?

1) My belief is that RESTful API access is unlikely to happen, just based on comments and a general feeling from conversations on the forum. 2) How people usually handle this is by writing data to either the bio/gm notes of a character or token, or writing to a handout and manually copying the data in some known format for use elsewhere.

Which is truly a shame. The current API is for great orchestration from within the game, such as moving tokens, changing status, effects, and other things that need to happen within  the game.  Whereas a REST API is more useful for the outside of the game capabilities. Exporting Characters into our own repositories, building characters, allowing multiple facets of information to touch into the games before we hit the table. The option provided is almost too much of a struggle, having to run such an operation on 16 PCs to then haggle my players to update their information to run the operation again is a rather big annoyance. It would be real nice to have the information pulled to my players, they make their changes and push it back in and I have a log of when the information was last changed, what was changed, etc. Something that can't feasibly be done with the current implementation.

I don't disagree with anything you've said. 

So I take it there hasn't been any official dev response save the conversations said a few years ago?

None that I'm aware of.  There may be a suggestion in the Suggestions and Ideas forum you could vote on, or perhaps you might want to add one.

Just means I will have to find a way to screen scrape the data. which is not ideal, nor is it something I imagine the Devs want to see.

Screen scraping for graphical data such as tokens, etc. is virtually impossible since it exists as a HTML5 canvas object that appears to be leveraging the three.js library/framework. I was thinking about creating a chrome extension that exports/imports character sheets via screen scrape and the API. I hope to create something that will help with your "annoyances" which are also my annoyances. Problem is, at my work it is end of year, so I'll have little time to work on this until probably after January.