vBulletin API question

[pjclas]

So honestly, I have no idea if this has been asked... I've done a lot of searching and have not been able to find my answers so I apologize in advance if this has been answered before.

I've been trying to interact with vBulletin for my site and the only supported external API I've found is the DataManager. That works well for what it is, but it doesn't provide all the things I need.

For instance, I need a way to find out what child forums a category has. I realize I can do this using the $vbulletin->forumcache global, but for me that seems like bad programming. I would like to be able to call an API that will remain supported from version to version that returns children of some forum id. There are functions in the vBulletin API like fetch_child_forums, but this has major side effects. It adds each subsequent query to the forumcache variable and returns that. In other words, if you call this in a loop for multiple forums, you constantly get back the data from all the prior calls.

I thought vBulletin was designed with the potential to be highly integrated with an existing site, but it seems that it's very challenging to do this properly. I don't like having to know details about the format of the vb database and such... I recently converted from SMF, and they provided lots of APIs that made all this easy.

I have to assume I'm just missing something here, right? Any help would be appreciated. I'm making this all work with my site, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right...