The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Movies --> appending responses --> add person method?
posted by Dr.BestSTAFFMOD on November 30, 2015 at 9:13 AM
Hi,
I would like to avoid web requests for persons biography data when fetching the movie data including the casts data.
After checking the API, I think the only way to get the biography/birthday etc. data for a person is to do this:
- get movie informations --> http://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/11?api_key=key&language=language&append_to_response=casts,images
- for all person_id in cast-data get http://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/person_id
Do you like the idea to change/append the api to include the person-data, maye by appending a "persons" parameter to append_to_response?
Maybe to get a result something like that?
{"cast_id":3,"character":"Luke Skywalker","credit_id":"52fe420dc3a36847f8000441","id":2,"name":"Mark Hamill","order":0,"profile_path":"/zUXHs0t0rhRNg7rD1pQm09KXAKP.jpg", "person":{"adult":false,"also_known_as":["Mark Hamil","Mark Richard Hamill"],"biography":"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.\n\nMark Richard Hamill (born September 25, 1951) is an American actor, voice artist, producer, director, and writer. Hamill is best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy and also well known for voice-acting characters such as the Joker in various animated series, animated films and video games, beginning with Batman: The Animated Series, the Skeleton king in Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Master Eraqus in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Skips in Regular Show, and Senator Stampington on Metalocalypse.\n\nDescription above from the Wikipedia article Mark Hamill, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia .","birthday":"1951-09-25","deathday":"","homepage":"","id":2,"imdb_id":"nm0000434","name":"Mark Hamill","place_of_birth":"Concord, California, USA","popularity":21.38462,"profile_path":"/zUXHs0t0rhRNg7rD1pQm09KXAKP.jpg"}}
Including the person data (by optional parameter) for a movie-id-query would save lots of web requestings.
But maybe there is already such an option and I didn't find it in the API reference?
Greetings from Germany
Reply by Travis Bell
on December 2, 2015 at 10:55 AM
Hi Dr.Best,
It's doubtful we'll ever support something quite like this. You're only solution is to make the extra call (or cache the data locally and you can then build out a custom schema to match your app's needs).
Reply by Dr.Best
on December 2, 2015 at 11:28 AM
Hi Travis,
thanks for the answer.
When I append "casts" to the response of a movie-query I already get the profile_path for each person, so I just thought why not getting the other data of a person in one go too to save bandwidth. Anyway, my plugin is storing the data in a local database. So I have to grab the data for each person in a movie-cast in extra calls to save them. Just wanted to be sure that I have to do it that way.
Have a good christmas time!