The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Discover/Movie not returning results when specifying certain genreId combinations
posted by monkeydodevSTAFFMOD on September 28, 2022 at 3:55 AM
Just this morning i noted my app stopped return results from the /Discover/Movie endpoint.
I have a query which returns films of specified genres using the [with_genres] field. This worked fine yesterday but is broken today.
Having played around a bit the results are inconsistent, but in general it seems happier to return results if it's a shorter set of id's, it seems to always fail on 4+ ids, but even if its a short set of id's, it might no like specific combinations
Example query below (minus the API key) which searches for genre_ids 28, 12, 16 & 37 - This is returning me a blank page
https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?api_key=[APIKEY]&language=en-US&sort_by=popularity.desc&include_adult=false&include_video=false&page=1&vote_count.gte=100&vote_average.gte=8&with_genres=28%2C%2012%2C%2016%2C%2037&with_watch_monetization_types=flatrate
Querying genres 16, 12, 28 works...
Querying genre 37 on its own works...
Querying genres 37, 16, 12 doesn't work...
Is there an ETA on when this will be fixed?
Reply by Leon
on September 28, 2022 at 7:55 AM
Could it be that there simply aren't any movies matching the specified criteria, with all four genres?
Reply by Travis Bell
on September 28, 2022 at 12:18 PM
Ya, I am not sure there are any movies that have all of your criteria and those four genres: action, adventure, animation and western. The addition of the extra criteria (rating, rating count and monetization type) is gonna shrink that list pretty quick. In fact, if you remove the watch option and trim the genres, but keep your rating criteria, there is only 5 westerns that match. Period.
Reply by monkeydodev
on September 29, 2022 at 1:00 AM
Ahhh, i didn't even occur to me that its returning movies on the basis of matching ALL of the genre ids. I thought it would return movies that match at least one of the genre Ids.
I would blame myself, but to be fair the behaviour isn't quite clear in the documentation which says 'Comma separated value of genre ids that you want to include in the results.' - That's my excuse for not considering the obvious anyway lolz...
btw IS there a way to run a query that retrieves moves which match genre ID's on an 'OR' rather than 'AND' basis?
Reply by Travis Bell
on September 29, 2022 at 1:03 AM
You bet. Use a pipe
|instead of a comma.