How do I do a search and get useful information back out of the RPC API?

[oliwarner]

I can ["search" .. .. "extended:1"] and that quickly returns album/track/contributor names, IDs and coverid, but it doesn't appear to be configurable. At a bare minimum, for albums and tracks, I need artist names. Tracks need album names too.

I can hit each one for more information. But now I'm smashing the API with n+1 queries each search.

Is there any way to do this sort of search in in one query through the API?

I note that the frontend doesn't use the RPC, it generates its own HTML server-side.

[mherger]

Instead of running an additional request per search result, you could run individual searches for those categories: instead of running search, then one albums per album, you do a albums 0 10 search:xyz, artists 0 10 search:xyz, tracks 0 10 search:xyz. It's three searches, a bit slower, but would give you the additional information you want quicker than going through the results of search and run individual lookups. search really was optimized for speed, to get results while you type. Therefore it tries to avoid looking up data in other tables.

[oliwarner]

So replace my search command with three detailed commands. Makes sense.

I've just tried that and this is my ignorance showing but how do I get it to return more tagged parameters? I can see albums supports a big pile of them but I'm not sure how to specify them in my command. I'm only getting ID and album (the title) by default.

[mherger]

Use the tags:... parameter. Eg.

albums 0 1 tags:tay
albums 0 1 tags:tay id:112808 year:2013 title:The 20/20 Experience artist:Justin Timberlake count:121

See http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Logitech/slimserver/public/8.4/HTML/EN/html/docs/cli-api.html#albums. This documentation is shipped with your LMS: http://localhost:9000/html/docs/cli-api.html (or whatever host name).

[oliwarner]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have been reading the CLI documentation but it's pretty dense stuff. None of the commands I was looking at used the tags: argument and I couldn't see it in the introduction. I'm just making excuses for myself. Thank you again, for this and everything else.