ThriftDB missing capability to get by id

[Joseph Adams]

Hi there,

I am rather new to the HNSearch API, so I have a question which seems to have not been answered properly yet.

So, I would like to use the API in one of my projects, but the ability I am missing is retrieving posts/discussions/comments etc. by a given ID.

On the API documentation site I have seen that the id's are not searchable, why is that? Are there any plans on being able to do this.

If you are not planing on permitting this kind of search, can you suggest an alternative?

Also, when looking at the ThriftDB doc, I see that there should be a way of accessing any item by ID, with something like /items/ID-HERE. Unfortunately that doesn't work!

Thanks!

[Andres Morey]

Hi Joseph,

The HNSearch API is a search API so it's not designed to allow crawling posts/discussions/comments by iterating through ids.

However, all the items returned by a search have an "_id" attribute which you can use to fetch items individually: 

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/3101876-9e153

In addition, comments have a "discussion" object whose "sigid" attribute can be used as a search filter to fetch all comments in the discussion together:

http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filter[fields][discussion.sigid]=4949659-1f5f0

Hope that helps!

Andres

[Harp B]

According to HN:
We've limited requests for old items.  If you're running a crawler,
    you can get this data a lot more easily from http://hnsearch.com/api.