[API Request] GetAlbumList2 endpoint: sorting and filtering should not be mutually exclusive

[dweymouth]

Type of change

API tweak

Proposal description

Currently, with the GetAlbumList2 endpoint, you can retrieve a list of all albums, paginated and sorted (by recently added, name a-z, etc.), OR you can retrieve a filtered list of albums (e.g. byGenre, by year range), but you can't specify a sort order on the result. Tweaking/extending the API to allow a sort and filter specified together would enable scenarios like "show recently added Rock albums"

Backward compatibility impact

If the API is called the way it is called today, i.e. specifying type=byGenre or byYear then the behavior is the same as the status quo

Backward compatibility

• No backward compatibility impact.

API details

I propose tweaking the GetAlbumList2 endpoint to accept the fromYear, toYear, and genre options without mandating that you also set type=byYear or byGenre. E.g. a request with genre=Classical, fromYear=1990, toYear=2023, type=recent should get all classical albums from 1990-2003, and return the result in recently added sort order

Security impacts

No response

Potential issues

No response

Alternative solutions

No response

[gravelld]

Agee, but I think I'd expect this is how it should work in the first place, given http://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp#getAlbumList2 . "can" is used, rather than "must" or "shall" which makes it almost sound optional, and no reference is made to type from the filtering parameters.

[dweymouth]

@opensubsonic/servers For each server, what is the implementation status of supporting fromYear toYear and genre alongside type=[recent|frequent|etc]? (ie allowing sorting the results of a filtered album list). If all OpenSubsonic servers already support this we can probably just add the bolded to the documentation of the type parameter for getAlbumList2:

The list type. Must be one of the following: random, newest, highest, frequent, recent. Since 1.8.0 you can also use alphabeticalByName or alphabeticalByArtist to page through all albums alphabetically, and starred to retrieve starred albums. Since 1.10.1 you can use byYear and byGenre to list albums in a given year range or genre. For all OpenSubsonic servers, fromYear, toYear, and genre can be specified without requiring type=byYear or byGenre.

[epoupon]

Maybe we could even make the type param multi valued? This way we can process multiple filters and sort. Too bad some combinations make no sense though.

[sentriz]

this would suit me. in the case of gonic it takes the filter/sort string and maps it to SQL clauses so it would be fine to handlde multiple of them

[dweymouth]

That is a separate discussion on how to extend the API. I was trying to see if we could get a quick win by just adding the bolded language to the documentation before we actually go about defining a proper OpenSubsonic extension for album list. As @gravelld said the original API was a bit underspecified and a lot of servers may have already implemented it that way rather than ignoring the genre=foo parameter if type was not also byGenre

If every single OpenSubsonic server has already supported using the existing parameters this way from the get-go - to sort and filter together - we don't even need to bother with an OpenSubsonicExtension definition since clients would know any server that returns openSubsonic=true in its subsonic-response would support it.