Latest posts API pagination

Dev
1

Hello everyone!

I’m getting latest posts from api using this endpoint: https://community.learnaboutgmp.com/posts.json

How can I get more results from latest posts? Is this possible?

I tried https://community.learnaboutgmp.com/posts.json?page=2 but it’s not working.

Thanks in advance!

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2

When I figured that out before I followed the instructions in the “reverse engineering” topic. I thought that I’d done it in https://github.com/pfaffman/discourse-Downloader, but I don’t see it there.

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3

You might have to hit /latest.json?page=2 instead of /posts.json and filter out the posts from the result.

https://meta.discourse.org/latest.json?page=2

EDIT: Ohh you want latest posts, not latest topics. Considering /posts by itself doesn’t have a UI, it probably is missing pagination, I’m sure a PR could be created for this. But to get what you want right now you could still parse the /latest.json endpoint and parse out the topic_id and the post number and fetch the post with /t/<topic_id>/<post_number>, but yea I can see why pagination on the /posts endpoint would be helpful.

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4

Okay, now that I’ve looked at the controller for /posts:

def latest
  params.permit(:before)
  ...

there is a “before” parameter, not a “page” parameter, but using it like a “page” is a bit different because it filters out private posts and such. But I think roughly you can use it like this:

  • hit /posts.json and get the first post id (currently it is 22000)
  • subtract 50 (that endpoint only shows at most 50 at a time)
  • hit /posts.json?before=21950
  • repeat

Part of the issue which doesn’t make total sense to me is that we are limiting the sql query to 50 results, but then we do more filtering on it after the initial sql query which is why you will not always get 50 results.

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5

Thanks guys! I’ll play with it.

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6

as the API designer: it works this way to make things easier on the Discourse server; if the server had to do a bunch of work to always fill up 50 posts anything using the API might start being a perf problem.

Basically it forces the consumers to be “good neighbors”, in a weird sense of the term.

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7

Question about using the API (which I’m doing through the discourse_api gem, cool!) - it’s related to pagination (I would also want to use the latest posts endpoint) but for my current example below I’ll provide something from users, since I started working on it first.

I am wanting to get all activity for a user (topics and replies is good) so I’m trying this:

vsoch = client.user_topics_and_replies("vsoch")

And then I consistently get a list of 30, regardless if the user obviously has more. I tried editing the source code to add a page variable:

# frozen_string_literal: true
module DiscourseApi
  module API
    module UserActions
      def user_replies(username, page=1)
        params = { "username": username, "filter": '5', page: page }
        response = get("/user_actions.json", params)
        response.body["user_actions"]
      end

      def user_topics_and_replies(username, page=1)
        params = { "username": username, "filter": "4,5", page: page }
        response = get("/user_actions.json", params)
        response.body["user_actions"]
      end
    end
  end
end

but it doesn’t seem to do anything - it’s always the same list of 30 regardless of the page number. Is it possible to get more than 30? Am I trying the wrong thing? Any help would be greatly appreciated - if I can figure out how to do it I’d very happily put in a PR so others can too :slight_smile:

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