443544 - Search API returns lots of empty addon elements

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: API, defect)

Description

[jeff griffiths]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: 

If I query the search API I get the expected results *plus* several dozen empty addon elements. Easy to filter out, admittedly, but might be indicative of a bug in the backend? Sample uri:

https://services.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/api/search/bookmarks

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Laaaaura! :)

Comment 2

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

This is a deprecated version of the API that was used to work with an old beta version of the add-ons manager.  The correct URL for the API as seen in Firefox 3.0 is:
https://services.addons.mozilla.org/%LOCALE%/%APP%/api/%API_VERSION%/search/%TERMS%/all/10/%OS%/%VERSION%

Or, completed on a mac build, it evaluates to:
https://services.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/api/1.1/search/bookmarks/all/10/Darwin/3.0.1pre

The 1.1 corresponds to the API url schema version, which is consistent with other services like AUS, VersionCheck, Blocklist, etc.

Comment 3

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

You know what, it should probably be fixed for the case where the api version is left out, or it needs to be documented somewhere that 1.1 should be used as I noted in the above comment.

I do agree that it's a bit confusing to see that stuff come back.

Laura - I'll leave this up to you; seems like we should clean it up somehow?

Comment 4

[jeff griffiths]

Wouldn't it also be better for the API version to default to 1.1 if no version is supplied? It sounds like the '1.0' version isn't used.

Perhaps I should explain what I'm doing, as well. I am implementing this API for ActiveState's addons site for Komodo extensions so that the Addons search etc functionality works in Komodo without code changes to the toolkit extension dialog. It would be helpful for me in my particular use case for this api to have more information in the API docs like:

 - api version details
 - some documentation on the XML format returned by the api calls

Comment 5

[Laura Thomson :laura]

The URLS in some versions of Firefox depend on this behavior, so we can't change it.