The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
overview in search
posted by neobiumSTAFFMOD on February 14, 2013 at 5:13 PM
I am brand new to API work, and am coming from a tutorial on Smashing Magazine. I had everything working nicely in the 2.1 API, and am trying to switch it over to v3. I notice that when I do a search, the results are now very abbreviated. I thought maybe I could use append_to_response to get the overview of a film as well, but that doesn't seem to work. I could do a search, get the id, then look the movie up directly with the id and get the overview there, but that seems kludgy and wasteful. What am I missing?
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 14, 2013 at 5:33 PM
There is no way to get the overview in the search results. You would have to go out and get the movie details in a second request if it's required.
Cheers.
Reply by neobium
on February 14, 2013 at 6:26 PM
Hi Travis, I'm not sure I follow you. Are you saying I should run the search, then pull the id and get the overview from a second query where I pull the movie data via the id?
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 14, 2013 at 6:39 PM
Yes, that is the only way to get the overview of a movie at this time. Depending on the design of your app, this isn't necessarily that many more requests if you cache the movie data locally. Ie. do a search and if you already have the id cached locally, pull it from your own cache and skip pulling it from our API.
Reply by Jack Luminous
on September 23, 2013 at 9:55 PM
Hi. I am converting from v2.1 to v3 as well and ran into the same problem neobium did. This is a bit of a letdown from v2.1. In my case, I am displaying a list of matches for the end-user to select the correct one. Not having the synopsis/overview makes my UI look a bit silly. Other items such as cast, etc. I can understand but overview I do not. I am in agreement that having to do a subsequent get just for the overview is wasteful for bandwidth. Is there anyway this could be improved?
Thanks for re-considering.
Reply by digitaldesaster
on January 28, 2014 at 2:00 PM
i am also wondering why this is not possible. most other apis (i know / i use) are trying to reduce the amount of api calls. if i like to fetch the 10 most popular movies including the overview details, i need 11 api calls. i am fine with it :-) , but i wonder what is your view on this..
Reply by caprica6
on February 2, 2014 at 8:35 AM
My main use of the API (the same as Jack Luminous above, and a pretty common use-case I suppose) is to find the right movie for a particular title.
Where multiple search results are returned, the overview is the most useful thing for me to use when I iterate the search results to decide which movie is the right one. For each search result, I make those additional 1+n requests just to get the overview to present in the list to the user.
So for me, adding overview to the movie search results would eliminate most of my TMDB API calls and simplify my application a lot.
On the other hand, I don't pay the bandwidth bill and I do cache everything on first access so it makes no real difference to me other than it being a little bit awkward.
Reply by Travis Bell
on February 2, 2014 at 10:09 AM
Hi guys,
We don't have any plans on changing this at the moment. If this is important, bring the data in house.
Cheers.
Reply by JoshGlazebrook
on February 20, 2014 at 4:57 AM
Just found this out too. :-/
Perhaps it might be useful to extend the "append to response" to the search endpoint as well? Maybe append_to_response=movie or =info?
Reply by victorcampeanu
on June 12, 2014 at 8:18 AM
i would like this as well, it is basic movie info
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 12, 2014 at 1:53 PM
If this ever gets looked at, I would imagine this to be how it would work but I haven't really spent any time thinking about it.
Unfortunately, our position on this has not yet changed. We do not have plans to add this at this time.