API suggested features

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superrune
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 19, 2019 9:51 pm

API suggested features

Post by superrune »

Hi!

I'm trying to be efficient towards your server, and offload some of the processing (like name matching) to my scraper app. I wish there was a simpler way of downloading a complete game title list for each platform, instead of iterating through pages like you do now.

How about a simple API call for downloading a JSON listing all game IDs and titles for a specific platform ID? And also include the total number of games on each platform! Something like this:

{
'platform':'40',
'count':320,
games:
[
{'id':0, 'game_title':'sanxion'},
{'id':1, 'game_title':'delta'},
{'id':2, 'game_title':'quedex'},
etc...
]
}

Screenscraper.fr has something similar, and it's a great time saver.

In addition to that, it would be great if there was a way to download a subset of the list. For example, being able to return all games after list number 320. This is in case you want the games added after the last time you got the list.

Thanks!

User avatar
Zer0xFF
Posts: 330
Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2018 9:18 am

Re: API suggested features

Post by Zer0xFF »

I'm trying to be efficient towards your server, and offload some of the processing (like name matching) to my scraper app. I wish there was a simpler way of downloading a complete game title list for each platform, instead of iterating through pages like you do now.
thanks for being considerate with your API usage.
How about a simple API call for downloading a JSON listing all game IDs and titles for a specific platform ID? And also include the total number of games on each platform! Something like this:
while we try not to dismiss ideas this quickly, I'd say the others would agree with me when I said this won't happen.
why? experience has shown us that people can't be trust to be as considerate as you are with the API,
if you ever used our old API/Site you would have probably remember that at times, it'd take up to a minute (some times more) for a response,
people would make the exact same request 10 times within the same seconds (which is really mind boggling) without a second thought. (and we're seeing the same thing happen with the new API, alas the limit at least minimises the impact it has on the server)

and I can easily see someone writing their app to exclusively use this feature, as a base for their search feature, so to avoid this headache, I dont see it happening I'm afraid.
In addition to that, it would be great if there was a way to download a subset of the list. For example, being able to return all games after list number 320. This is in case you want the games added after the last time you got the list.
this is a feature I can get behind, I've added it to our TODO list.
I will add though, that for this, you could/should be using the update API. and while I would acknowledge that the api isn't ideal for such case (aka only polling specific platform), but as of 2 months ago, you should be able to identify a new game's platform with certainty as I currently have it set that platform id will be the 1st things to be listed after "[NEW]" entry.
Regards
Zer0xFF

superrune
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 19, 2019 9:51 pm

Re: API suggested features

Post by superrune »

Thanks for your reply. I'm a fan of optimization, everybody wins when you have efficient code :)

But I see the arguments against downloading a full list, although I'm surprised someone would abuse it. It's a bit of a hassle to compile data from multiple pages, but no biggie. And as long as there in the future is a a way to get platform-specific updates from a certain date, things can still be pretty optimized.

And I'm of course hard-coding a one-second delay between each API request. Weird that anybody would hammer a web server like you mention!

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