The Movie Database Support

The best way to explain this is with an example:

If you search for "disney", and request page 1, you will get:

{ "page":1, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }

For pages 2 through 6, you get what you'd expect:

{ "page":2, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }
{ "page":3, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }
{ "page":4, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }
{ "page":5, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }
{ "page":6, "results":[ 17 records ], "total_pages":6, "total_results":117 }

At this point, you have retrieved 117 unique TMDb movie IDs.

However, if you then request page 7, you will get:

{ "page":7, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":9, "total_results":175 }

Two of the movies returned in these 20 records are not in the original 117:

74146: Classic Cartoon Favorites, Vol. 5 - Extreme Sports Fun
74148: Classic Cartoon Favorites, Vol. 6 - Extreme Music Fun

For page 8, you get more:

{ "page":8, "results":[ 20 records ], "total_pages":9, "total_results":175 }

Four of these 20 are new:

51313: Esperando la Navidad
39251: Fluppy Dogs
46235: Little Einsteins - The Legend of the Golden Pyramid
126570: The Chronological Donald Volume Three

For page 9:

{ "page":9, "results":[ 15 records ], "total_pages":9, "total_results":175 }

One of which is new:

38566: Winnie the Pooh - ABC's

If you request page 10, you finally get an empty result set:

{ "page":10, "results":[], "total_pages":9, "total_results":175 }

However, note that all total you have only retrieved 172 records - not 175. And, only 124 of those are actually unique.

I have not examined the actual results returned by the web search, but it appears to show this same behavior.

This will put you on "Page 12 of 12" of 117 results: https://www.themoviedb.org/search?query=disney&movie_page=12

This will put you on "Page 13 of 18" of 175 results: https://www.themoviedb.org/search?query=disney&movie_page=13

Page 19 will finally show "We didn't find any movies."

BTW... if you click "formatting help" on the new discussion form, the top of the modal pop-up is outside the viewport and you can't get rid of it. (A preview would be nice too)

1 reply (on page 1 of 1)

Jump to last post

The fist issue you describe is probably related to different pages being cached at different times and then in between cached entries, things like popularity get adjusted ever so slightly which will have items appear on different pages at different times. Not much we can do about this, you will just have to code around it.

The second issue, related to the weird number of total_results is weird. It's probably related to the crazy custom pagination code that we're currently using. Movie (and maybe person) search is I think, the only place this is used so I would be surprised if you ever saw this problem anywhere else. Unfortunately I can't do anything about this until some stuff out of my control is addressed. I know that was vague but there's some business things that we've been trying to address for about a year now and still haven't achieved. Our hope is that by the end up January these get done and at that point I am free to re-factor search.

Can't find a movie or TV show? Login to create it.

Global

s focus the search bar
p open profile menu
esc close an open window
? open keyboard shortcut window

On media pages

b go back (or to parent when applicable)
e go to edit page

On TV season pages

(right arrow) go to next season
(left arrow) go to previous season

On TV episode pages

(right arrow) go to next episode
(left arrow) go to previous episode

On all image pages

a open add image window

On all edit pages

t open translation selector
ctrl+ s submit form

On discussion pages

n create new discussion
w toggle watching status
p toggle public/private
c toggle close/open
a open activity
r reply to discussion
l go to last reply
ctrl+ enter submit your message
(right arrow) next page
(left arrow) previous page

Settings

Want to rate or add this item to a list?

Login