Bugs in getting individual image by id for votes and favourites

#1

I found a bug or two in the API.

For now it’s only possible to get votes and favourites for uploaded images. Quiet weird if you consider that you can favourite images not uploaded by the user.

Bug 1

Favourites and votes on existing images are never returned.

Reproduce for existing images

  1. Favourite an existing cat image using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites with sub_id
  2. Notice that this cat image appears in https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites?sub_id=my_sub_id
  3. Using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/:image_id?sub_id=my_sub_id will return the image with breeds but without votes and favourites

Reproduce for uploaded images

  1. Favourite an uploaded cat image using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites with sub_id
  2. Notice that this cat image appears in https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites?sub_id=my_sub_id
  3. Using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/:image_id?sub_id=my_sub_id will return the image without breeds (of course) but with votes and favourites

Solution

  • Disable voting and favouriting on existing images
  • Return vote and favourite for existing images where needed
  • Most reliable solution would be to implement include_vote and include_favourite on all endpoint for fetching images, including search (See bug 2)

Bug 2

tltr; Favourites and votes on existing images are always returned (when sub_id is provided)

Referring to the postman documentation we can provide https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/:image_id?sub_id=my_sub_id with the Query Params include_vote and include_favourite. The are both not working at all. If we provide a sub_id we are getting the votes and favourites, if we don’t we don’t. Again it’s the sub_id which change this behavior.

Reproduce

  1. Favourite an uploaded cat image using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites with sub_id
  2. Notice that this cat image appears in https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/favourites?sub_id=my_sub_id
  3. Using https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/:image_id?sub_id=my_sub_id will return the image without breeds (of course) but with votes and favourites only if sub_id is provided
  4. Notice that https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/:image_id?sub_id=my_sub_id&include_vote=false&include_favourite=0 doesn’t change the behavior at all no matter what values are given for include_vote and include_favourite.

Solution

  • Make them work (l0l)
  • Or remove them from the documentation and provide information about the behavior behind sub_id
  • Most beautiful solution would be to make them work and provide them on other endpoints like mentioned in Bug 1

My user case
I have a grid of cat images on which every image can be favourited by the user. This is shown in de grid on each image. But because the search API doesn’t provide votes and favourites I have to fetch the favourites as well and iterate over that array to check if the current image_id is on one of the objects.

The problem is that both search results and favourites results are paged. So if the favourite of image 1 was not found on page 0, I’ll have to fetch page 1, maybe page 2 and so on. For each image on the grid. Or maybe limit the amount of favourites for each account and sub_id.

Or I have to search for images, and for each image shown on the grid a have to refetch it using the image/:image_id endpoint and provide the sub_id. Again for each cat image shown on the grid. Both solutions are not ideal and will result in tens or maybe hundreds of API calls for data that can be provided out of the box when include_vote and include_favourite are implemented like I mentioned…

Hope I made myself clear and maybe I’m wrong. Would be glad to here from you!