/user/dashboard ignores offset > 250?

[TAKAHASHI Shuhei]

Hi Tumblr API gurus,

I'm recently playing with Tumblr API. It's simple and easy to use --
thanks Tumblr team for making this up!

Today I have questions regarding &offset= parameter. It seems that (at
least) /user/dashboard ignores offset parameter if the specified value
is greater than 250, just returning results as if the parameter is
omitted. I'd like to ask:

- is this expected behavior?
- is there any (official/non-official) document mentioning this limit?
- is there any way to workaround this limit?

Thanks in advance,
Shuhei / nya

--
Shuhei Takahashi a.k.a nya

[John Bunting]

Hey nya,

We do limit the dashboard offset to 250. 

Yeah, there is no official documentation on the limit and no official workaround for now.

Another limit you may have noticed is that you can only request 50 posts at a time, at max. Call 51 or greater and you'll get dropped down to 20 posts at a time.

Thanks

--
John Bunting

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability
    --Edsger W. Dijkstra

[TAKAHASHI Shuhei]

Hello John,

Thanks for quick reply!

 

We do limit the dashboard offset to 250. 

Yeah, there is no official documentation on the limit and no official workaround for now.

I see, then I'll keep it in my mind so I won't issue requests with offset >= 250.

BTW, it will be great if API could return an error for such requests, rather than silently discarding the parameter. Also if you mention the limit in official API document it will help many developers like me :)

Another limit you may have noticed is that you can only request 50 posts at a time, at max. Call 51 or greater and you'll get dropped down to 20 posts at a time.

Well, I thought the maximum of "limit" parameter was 20 because official API document said so ("1–20, inclusive"). It's good to know.

Thanks,

[felix bonkoski]

I agree that the Docs should be updated with notes like these.

Undocumented "features" (like that you can request > 20 dash posts at a time) & unexpected behaviors (limit of 250 on dash, limit of 1000 posts on likes, etc etc) are not cool and should be documented.

It puts everyone on the same field and you fewer frustrated developers.

felix

[felix bonkoski]

On Sunday, April 1, 2012 6:41:12 AM UTC-5, TAKAHASHI Shuhei wrote:

- is there any way to workaround this limit?

There are some pretty hacky things you can do using the "since_id" parameter on /user/dashboard to obtain an arbitrary number of posts, but its a little hacky and I wont go into specifics here. John Bunting might not approve :P  But I leave that as an exercise for you to figure out.

[einzelkind]

Another vote for this, please. I've just wasted an evening trying to debug why offset > 250 posts silently wraps to 0. How many more of these kind of things are there?

[Jane Gao]

So if you put offset to 250, you get 250; if you put offset to 251, you get 0; if you request 50 posts, you get 50; if you request 51, you get 20...

Documentation would help but it'll be much better for the API to return a self explanatory error in this type of condition.

zz

[Bryan Downing]

Yeah, major +1 on this.