Issue Detail Workflow - API Developers

#1 Edited by zengei (10 posts) - 4 years, 3 months ago - Show Bio

So I'm trying to come up with a good workflow for fetching the details of an issue given a <volume title>, <issue number>, and (optionally) , <year of issue>.

My first instinct is to do a query on the search resource with the resources parameter set to "issue" to filter by issues and the query string being "<volume title> <issue number>", however it appears no issues are ever returned by a query on the search resource. Is this an issue to be fixed?

Alternatively I would do:

1. Query on the search resource, filtered by volume, with the query string being <volume title>
2. If <year of issue> is provided, filter out volumes that have a start year after <year of issue>, I would also like to filter out volumes whose count_of_issues is less than the <issue number>, but that's not currently provided in the search results of a volume.
3. If the number of volumes after filtering is >1 then present info to the user so they can select the right one.
4. I would now have a volume ID, so I could query the volume resource for that specific ID
5. The volume resource would provide a list of issues, but selecting the right one would be a problem. The issue numbers are not provided in the response so I would have to iterate through the issues, getting their details until I found one with issue number = <issue number>. If the volume is say... Fantastic Four, in the worse case that would mean 563 GETs to find the correct issue.

So it would probably be best to provide the issue number in the issue list in the volume resource. Although it would be great if doing a search for "<volume title> <issue number> <year of issue>" and filtering by issue could return the possible issue IDs directly.

EDIT: Even better if I could do explicit filtering on the issues resource :)

#2 Posted by andy (62 posts) - 4 years, 3 months ago - Show Bio

I'll add a volume filter on the issue resource for ya in the next day or so. Sorry for the delay, just trying to wrap another project up first.

#3 Posted by zengei (10 posts) - 4 years, 3 months ago - Show Bio

Lord Sedrik said:

"I'll add a volume filter on the issue resource for ya in the next day or so. Sorry for the delay, just trying to wrap another project up first."

Excellent, thanks.

#4 Posted by Hardartist (802 posts) - 4 years, 2 months ago - Show Bio

Lord Sedrik said:

"I'll add a volume filter on the issue resource for ya in the next day or so. Sorry for the delay, just trying to wrap another project up first."

He is right that i am confused with evrything about API Davelopers.

#5 Posted by LordAndrew (146 posts) - 4 years, 2 months ago - Show Bio

Are you developing an application that makes use of Comic Vine's API? If not, then you really don't need to worry about it.

#6 Posted by Darksbane (6 posts) - 3 years, 10 months ago - Show Bio

@Lord Sedrik said:

" I'll add a volume filter on the issue resource for ya in the next day or so. Sorry for the delay, just trying to wrap another project up first. "

Did this ever happen?

#7 Posted by zengei (10 posts) - 3 years, 8 months ago - Show Bio

Any word on this?

#8 Posted by macmanja (1 posts) - 3 years, 7 months ago - Show Bio

Bump

#9 Posted by comicvine12345 (2 posts) - 3 years, 7 months ago - Show Bio

I'd certainly like to see this - searching for an issue seems fundamental to a comic book database.

#10 Posted by cbanack (48 posts) - 3 years, 2 months ago - Show Bio

Yes, this would probably cut down a lot of unnecessary load on the comicvine servers.

A simple solution (among many possibilities) would be to include the issue number as one of the details that appears in the list of issues when you query for details about a series. That way, api users could create a mapping of issue numbers <-> issue IDs without having to do a separate query for every single issue, and then search through them all!

Such a mapping is essential to most of the kinds of ComicVine API-using applications that I can imagine (including my own, of course), which is why I suspect much of the load on the ComicVine servers could already be coming from a bunch of these (fundamentally unnecessary) extra queries.

(On the other hand, if there IS a way to get a mapping of issue numbers to issue IDs WITHOUT having to query each issue individually, I'd be delighted to hear about it...?)

#11 Posted by Pewpewrawr (2 posts) - 2 years, 11 months ago - Show Bio

Is this possible yet? I just started writing a plugin for MeediOS to scrape comic info and being able to search for volume + issue number would make it easier to develop, and cut down on a lot of API queries.

#12 Posted by mabster (22 posts) - 1 year, 10 months ago - Show Bio

I suspect that this still isn't working, a year later. If I try to query /issues/?api_key={key}&volume=3857 (to just get the issues in Silver Surfer volume 3) I get a result with over 230,000 issues (presumably every issue in CV's database).

I know I can ask for a list of issue on the /volume/ resource, but that only gets me issue-number and name. If I want more details than that (with paged results) I'm outta luck.

Matt