Can we get a 'brief' option for some of the APIs?

[Grunthos]

Hi,

The reviews.list API is, afaict, the only way to get a list of books on a shelf and it returns a lot of data about each book, including but not limited to:

- isbns
- title
- image links
- description
- all author details
- page count
- rating info

For large shelves, just getting a list of books on the shelf can be an expensive operation.

Would there be any chance of getting an extra parameter to the api that allowed for a more brief output?

eg. option=brief|full

or perhaps a list of data classes we want, for example:

fields=book.id,book.title,author.name

The idea being to substantially reduce the data when retrieving, say, a list of 1000 books.

I am currently working on integrating the Android app 'BookCatalogue' (https://market.android.com/details?id...) with GoodReads, and the specific problem I am trying to address is synchronizing BookCatalogue bookshelf contents with those of GoodReads bookshelves.

Any help or suggestions (or API additions!) would be very welcome.

[Michael]

It's the only way.


The json response is a bit smaller, but we should have an option like that. Someday we'll build it.

[Scott]

It is even worse than this post makes out. I queried a shelf with one book on it and it returned 1500 lines of XML. I found that it was actually returning books on other shelves as well. Can we at least restrict the results to the shelf we asked for?

[[deleted user]]

Hey Scott,

Agreed...a lot of the responses we're sending are unnecessarily long for most purposes.

You do have the option to pass the param minimal="1" with our /book endpoint (/book/show/:id), which should get you a much shorter book response. But that's the only endpoint that we have where that's an option.

I'll file a ticket to investigate adding similar params to some of our other endpoints, but I don't have a timeframe for when we'll be able to look into it.