I'm not sure if I understand the problem, but... maybe by using this:

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/person/1304659?api_key=[MY_KEY]&language=en-US&append_to_response=combined_credits

Thanks for the quick response but your solution doesn't work for me as it

1. presupposes I already know the ID of the person, which I don't; I only have his/her name
2. (correct me if I'm wrong) but combined_credits include TV which I don't want
3. the result does not include the release_type nor the length of the film so I can't verify if it was theatrical

Okay, I'll try and explain it again.

I have the *name * of a person, say "Robert Stadd" and I want to find out which Feature Films with Theatrical Releases he worked on, and what his positions were on those films.

What I'm looking to figure out is how can I accomplish that in the fewest possible calls, as the only way I can figure out how to do it requires a minimum of 3 calls, and generally a lot more.

What I'm doing know is the following, which seems really unwieldy:

 a. https://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/person?query={person_name)&api_key=[my key]&language=en-US

This returns me 0 or more users who match that name. In the case of Robert Stadd I take the one PersonID and call

 b. https://api.themoviedb.org/3/person/{person_id}/movie_credits?api_key=[my key]&language=en-US

In the case of Robert, this returns 10 separate projects but without enough information for me to know if each project had a theatrical release. So now I need to iterate through each one of these projects to get more details on them by calling

c. https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/{movie_id}?api_key=[my key]&language=en-US&append_to_response=release_dates

Note: The last append_to_response is required to get the release TYPE (Theatrical, Theatrical (Limited) etc)

Thus to get all the information I need on Robert requires 12 calls (one call in step a, one call in step band ten calls (one for each project) in step c

I'm hoping there is some way to make this more efficient.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hi there,

The API isn't really designed for queries such as yours. Supporting something more efficient based on your use case here is not something that would be very easy to add.

Perhaps one day in the future something more dynamic could be built but until then, the best solution I can recommend is to bring the data in house, that way you can customize your schema however makes the most sense for your use case.