The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
What is the logic behind the Genre id numbers ?
posted by ianizaguirreSTAFFMOD on August 15, 2018 at 5:40 PM
Here I see the list of Genres with id numbers: https://developers.themoviedb.org/3/genres/get-movie-list
(1) So for example, looking at the snippet below, I wanted to know why the genre id numbers are random, why not make the genre id's number follow an order like 1,2,3,4,5 etc. why make random numbers? ... I am learning so I am trying to understand why its like this.
{
"genres": [
{
"id": 28,
"name": "Action"
},
{
"id": 12,
"name": "Adventure"
},
{
"id": 16,
"name": "Animation"
},
{
"id": 35,
"name": "Comedy"
}, ...
(2) I know that I would use an API call like (https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/437557?api_key=KEY ) to get the details of one particular movie, and inside of that details object we have the genres of that one particular movie. So what situation would someone want to call just - https://api.themoviedb.org/3/genre/movie/list?api_key=KEY , and just get a list of the generic genres object we have above ?
Thank you for your help! :-)
Reply by Travis Bell
on August 16, 2018 at 1:06 PM
Hi there,
They aren't really random, there's lots of genres that have either been deleted or disabled over the years. The table started at 1 and incremented up.
While it's true that the get details method returns a human readable name, none of the list methods do (popular, top rated, discover, etc...) So the usual practice would be to store the genres locally and then you can reference them like any other linked object.
Reply by ianizaguirre
on August 17, 2018 at 11:30 PM
Thank you.