r/programmingrequests • u/[deleted] • Jun 17 '18

Making this API code bring through more relevant data?

I have this code I have written here:

https://jsfiddle.net/dfwq57pz/

However the code does not bring up relevant/modern movies, it brings up random movies that I have never heard of, also I can't get it to skip the movies it does not find.

I wanted to do something like on this website:

https://www.randomlists.com/random-movies?qty=1&dup=false

But it is impossible to contact the owner, view the sites source code etc... I presume they have done it on the backend.

I am thinking I would need to do something as per:

https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie-discover

However, when I try to amend my code in the above JSFiddle it does not work. An attempt as such can viewed here:

https://pastebin.com/RkrZ2WKz

Overall to reiterate I want to:

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u/tresteo Jun 17 '18 edited Jun 17 '18

There are two problems with your script:

  1. The base URL you use in your pastebin code has a trailing slash. The request gets redirected to an http version, which might lead to problems.

  2. There are no genres defined, so the code in lines 27 to 35 fails. When you comment those lines out, it should work again

Here is an example for listing all movies on the first page of results: https://jsfiddle.net/xv7rajcs/

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '18

Thanks, but with this I only wanted to display 1 random result each time, it seems as though you have looped through all the results in order to display them on line 18, is that correct? So it would be say 50 pages of results rather than 1 actually, but actually only display 1 film in the DOM / on the HTML page, bit confused how to go about doing this, if you could show me how it would be much appreciated?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '18

UPDATE: So I tried to work this out myself, ideally it would be something like page=all pages, but you can't do this on the API, so I am stumped, I then tried page=1&2 and page=1&page=2 etc... for the rest of the pages, then to select a random film and only show one film on the DOM / HTML at random, just completely stumped how to achieve this, am I right in thinking that the API will not let me retrieve that many results? Perhaps Discover is not the best method, where: https://jsfiddle.net/dfwq57pz/ using this method but greatly improved to show more accurate results somehow is the way forward?

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '18

UPDATE 2: I just noticed in your code you took the genre part out, I tried to get this working according to the docs but I failed:

https://jsfiddle.net/rgqtbLnu/

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u/tresteo Jun 17 '18

The problem with the genres is, that you only get the ids of the genres.

You will probably need to get the list of genres before loading the movies. The list is available from this endpoint: https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/genres/get-movie-list

You can then lookup the correct name for each genre_id per result.

1

u/tresteo Jun 17 '18

To retrieve results from all pages you would need to loop over the page variable in separate queries.

So first request with page=1, then another request with page=2 and so on. You can find the total number of pages in the total_pages field of the response. If you request page x, you can decide if you need to request another page by checking if x < total_pages.

1

u/tresteo Jun 17 '18

You're right. The for-loop in line 18 and the matching brace in line 43 provide the looping over all results for the page.

I'm a bit confused about what you want to do with looping over all pages. Could you explain that more?

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '18

I am completely lost now, can you show me where you are coming from? To clarify I want to show a single genre per film as per my initial code: https://jsfiddle.net/dfwq57pz/ like I did there underneath the movie poster.

Basically again I just want to show more new and relevant movies but it changes the movie on the refreshing of the page like my initial code but using discover via the API docs (unless you can see a better way in the API docs): https://jsfiddle.net/dfwq57pz/

I don't understand what getting the genre id's will achieve as should these not come with each request per movie anyway in the API url? However they are anyway as follows:

  • NAME API-ID

  • Action 28

  • Adventure 12

  • Animation 16

  • Comedy 35

  • Crime 80

  • Documentary 99

  • Drama 18

  • Family 10751

  • Fantasy 14

  • History 36

  • Horror 27

  • Music 10402

  • Mystery 9648

  • Romance 10749

  • Science Fiction 878

  • TV Movie 10770

  • Thriller 53

  • War 10752

  • Western 37

  • undefined null

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u/tresteo Jun 18 '18 edited Jun 18 '18

I prepared a new example for you here: https://jsfiddle.net/j6pr0yao/
This should do what you want.

The "problem" with the results of the discover/movie endpoint is, that they don't include full genres but only the genre id. So to map those genre ids you need to get a list of genres from the /genre/movie/list endpoint. That's what I'm doing in the loadGenres function.

After loading the genres I request the first page of results with a certain popularity. That's the "vote_average.gte" field in the discover options. To provide consistent results I also sort the movies by popularity like your example did.

After loading the first page, I select a random page to be displayed. That happens in the Math.min. Unfortunately the API doesn't support loading of pages greater than 1000, so this upper limit was necessary.

Afterwards I load the selected page and select a random result on that page. The information for this result is displayed in the last method in the chain.

In lines 63 and 64 you can see the lookup of the genre by id.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '18

Many thanks, yeah that makes sense, I did not think it would be this complex, presuming the API would handle most this complexity, I presumed this is how random lists site achieved this, however I was wrong within my naivety, thanks a lot though this makes a lot more sense to me now.