I was going to advise you on the calendar data you were looking for on the subreddit, but that guy answered it for you pretty much. I had a go earlier, and it is pretty crazy complex.
They already have paid guides for working with Workflow. Might just write one myself, LOL.
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I'll show you how to parse a JSON interface with it. (I got it initially from the subreddit for use with Forecast.io's API)
It's two parts - Dumping the data, and then reading it.
Dumping the data
Everything else in your workflow relies on getting this main part to work with.
URL - They call it a Resource URL. This can be something like
http://api.wunderground.com/api/Your_Key/conditions/q/CA/San_Francisco.json,
http://xkcd.com/info.0.json,
https://api.forecast.io/forecast/APIKEY/LATITUDE,LONGITUDE,TIME, whatever. If you open it up in Safari, it'll just dump a bunch of plain text.
Get Contents of Web Page - Grabs the HTML
Make Rich Text from HTML - Converts it into Rich Text (It doesn't work without this step, I don't understand why as its plain text to begin with, but there you go)
Get Text from Input - Gets the "plain text" again from the rich text (Yeah...).
Set Variable - You don't have to call it "Dictionary", but it just gets confusing if you don't, especially when you make really, really big workflows.
Reading the data
So that plain text you now have as the input is what they call a "dictionary". Depending on what you're working with, you might need to go down levels to get to the data you want. If you're working with something like weather, there'll most likely be sections for the current weather, and daily summaries.
Easiest way to figure out what the heck you're looking at is to know that sections will follow with
:{ and data will just be
:.
PHP:
{"currently":{"time":1429828638,"summary":"Overcast","icon":"cloudy","nearestStormDistance":47,"nearestStormBearing":201,"precipIntensity":0,"precipProbability":0,"temperature":73.52,"apparentTemperature":73.52,"dewPoint":67.87,"humidity":0.83,"windSpeed":6.55,"windBearing":86,"visibility":8.65,"cloudCover":1,"pressure":1010.36,"ozone":296}
So now you need to read the "dictionary" by grabbing that variable with
Get Variable and
Get Dictionary from Input. In the case of weather APIs, it's the 100 lines of data which you now want to narrow down.
I'll let you figure that out on your own and just tell you how to pull the other data though.
(It's in that first bit about the sections, once you figure that out, you want to instead pull from that second dictionary)
The data is what they call "keys", and you pull them with the
Get Value for Key action. Right afterwards you want to give it a name with "Set Variable". So for every little bit of data you pull out, your set of actions will be:
Get Variable - Your dictionary (ex. currently)
Get Dictionary from Input - Grabs the entire list of data (ex. summary, temperature, humidity)
Get Value for Key - Which bit of data you want (ex. temperature)
Set Variable - Placeholder name (ex. temperature)
NOTE: If you need to do something to the data, like round a number, or remove some text, you want to do it straight after you get the value and before you set the variable. If the said data is an image, you want to use the Get Images from Input action here.
The
Nothing action is good to make this all slightly more readable by the way!
And that's pretty much it. Now you just stick your placeholder key variables in a notification, text box, set name, speak text, copy to clipboard, etc. I have one that appends a plain text table to a Drafts document with the time and date added.
