Show me what you’ve got!
EVE Online does something wonderful with its data, it doesn’t hide it away behind fancy graphics and menus; it puts it on display for the whole universe to see. Almost everything you see in many of EVE’s user interfaces is pulled from a database with IDs, put in a table for you to filter and analyze as you see fit.
However, these IDs are not shown in the game, instead their name and description are used to identify items in a market search for example. Requests to the CREST API require an ID, so how can we locate the ID of a given item name such as the common mineral Tritanium? If you’ve spent any time with EVE APIs, you’ll probably know this as 34 - but what about Kernit? or Heavy Missile Launcher I?
The solution here is to make use of EVE’s Static Data Export (SDE). A 170mb database of all the items, stations, solar systems, regions, and corporations that exist in the game. Information about the SDE can be found on the EVE Developer Resources . They have also been generous enough to allow a download of the Image Export Collection (IEC), allowing 3rd party developers the ability to show icons of the items in their applications.
Making use of this database would allow a developer to locate the ID for a given item, Kernite - 20, Heavy Missile Launcher I - 501.