API Feedback needed

david wrote 9 years ago: 1

Hello all!

If you're an application developer who is interested in (or might one day be interested in) an API for retrieving all sorts of information about the TV world: we would love to get your feedback! The current API isn't complete yet, but I think enough calls are implemented to be able to judge the system and gather some feedback.

The currently implemented calls are:

- search through all shows in our database: http://api.tvmaze.com/search/shows?q=girls
- search through all people in our database: http://api.tvmaze.com/search/people?q=lauren
- view the schedule for a given day and country: http://api.tvmaze.com/schedule?country=US&date=2014-10-05
- view details about one show: http://api.tvmaze.com/shows/1
- view a show's episode list: http://api.tvmaze.com/shows/1/episodes
- view details about one person: http://api.tvmaze.com/people/1

The API outputs results in JSON (if you're on firefox and want to browse around, I can recommend https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/jsonview/), and conforms to the HATEOAS / HAL principles.

Let me know: comments, bug reports, feature requests.. everything is welcome :)

FlowDiscuss wrote 9 years ago: 1

Hey ! Just discovered the API, first suggestions:

Schedules:

Add filters such as show, season, episode

EndPoint that list all the countries that you already handled

Articles:

Add an article endpoint (links to your site and maybe a snippet of text), allow filtering such as date (from, until) and a filter for show would be great. If you could have season / episode would be even better.

Shows:
Description shouldnt have any html tags in them

Episodes:

You should add all the direct URLs to each of your tabs there, so that API users can link back to them without having to work out your link system. Also if you could say how many items are available within each tabs (2 reviews, 0 trailers etc), that would help not displaying links that will bring to empty page on your site.

david wrote 9 years ago: 1

What do you mean with a show/season/episode filter for the schedule? I don't understand how that would work in the context of the schedule functionality.

The available countries are defined by the ISO 3166-1 standard. You can check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 for a list of available codes.

I hadn't considered adding articles to the API yet, but if there's interest for it that sounds very plausible. Will discuss this!

I'll think about it, but I'm not sure if we'll add links to all of a show/episode's subpages to the API. If you want to generate them manually though (e.g. by just appending /cast to the URL the API gives you) you can count on the fact that this URL scheme is very unlikely to change in the future.