Tmdb API → Fight Club

Assigned to Tender discussion #142. As reported in Tender:

Hello,

My main use case for the TMDB API is, for example, given a file name like "BadBoys.iso", I want to find the right TMDB ID so I can fetch (primarily) the overview text and cover/backdrop art and display it in my HTPC application. I think this is probably a pretty common use case.

So I turn this filename heuristically into "Bad Boys" and submit it to the v3 movie search API.

At time of writing this returns six results and the first result is the correct one. This works most of the time so I can simply pick the first result.

Now, for the sake of argument let's assume I was actually searching for some other movie with the same title.

My strategy was going to be to display the results of the search in a list, then pick the right one from that list. The information that I have to pick the right one is one or more of:

backdrop_path
id
original_title
popularity
poster_path
release_date
title

Ideally I would have liked the movie overview text in the initial search response, but since it's not I thought I would display (again in a list) the poster and backdrop with the title and release year for each result. For the vast majority of cases this too would probably be enough to identify the right movie (assuming a poster and/or backdrop was available).

But then I found a problem with that, in that it looked like I was getting an "adult" movie back in that list, and I do not want to pull back any adult poster or backdrop art.

So what this leaves me with really, since I have no overview nor adult flag, is to identify the right movie I now maybe need to pull the movie info, director and/or cast list for each movie in the search results - meaning at least (1+n) queries to TMDB, maybe (1+2n) queries and so on.

Do you have any view on this? When you were designing the API did you envisage some other usage pattern that I should adopt? Do any other forum members have a better strategy for this? I am very keen to minimise the number of queries I send to TMDB (and I do cache everything locally once it's read the first time).

Thanks!