return additional book fields in search

[MiniXC]

We should give more information on books in the API, the following fields are requested.

• author (needs to be added to database, currently only have author_id)
• genre (not in database at all, is this possible to get added @CalumMcM?)
• rating
• number of reviews (will return both text and star review count)
• goodreads url
• year published

[CalumMcM]

I'll update the database this afternoon with the fields that are available (rating, number of reviews, goodreads url, year published as well as including an image of the book). The authors are stored in another database it would seem which will take longer to integrate and the genre does not seem to be included anywhere unfortunately.

[MiniXC]

I included the fields that are available in 097ae8c so there is no work on the database needed for them. Filtering by genre is a big part of the interface afaik, should we rethink that then perhaps? Is there any api that can be queried from the frontend for the author name given an author_id?

Edit: just found this endpoint for author information given an author_id: https://www.goodreads.com/api/index#author.show

[CalumMcM]

Nice work with the API. When you say you have included the fields, where have you included them? As they are not included in the review_data table, so are you making two API requests, one to review_data and another to book_data? If so, would you not prefer for everything you need to be in one table?

[MiniXC]

We are doing an extra roundtrip to book_data atm, which of course isn't great for speed. We have two options to improve this (that I can think of).

1. as you suggest, add fields from books to reviews
2. add the isbn to sentence data and send both requests at once

1) will need more storage space and be faster, while 2) might be slightly slower due to mongodb posssibly being slower when two requests come in at the same time

[CalumMcM]

Okay then. I'll continue with what I was going to do this afternoon and add the fields; rating, number of reviews, goodreads url, year published as well as the image of the book to the review_data table. That way allowing you to pursue option 1.