Questions tagged [dev-tip]

A tip for developers working with the Stack Exchange API.

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2 votes
1 answer
48 views

Where do I look for a new-to-the-network technical-overview introduction to what a script/app/etc. basically is, incl. differences between them?

Where do I look for a new-to-the-network technical-overview introduction to what a script/app/etc. basically is, including differences between them? Basically, I'm looking for onboarding documentation ...
4 votes
0 answers
872 views

How to retrieve paged API results in C# and Silverlight

In this tip we are going to leverage the SimpleRequestFactory and gather a multipage response. Let's pull the first 5 pages of 100 users on stackapps.com. NOTE: for Silverlight, substitute Newtonsoft....
3 votes
3 answers
726 views

How to format an url-friendly slug for question urls

I would like to construct a slug starting from the question title. It would be useful to apps that want to show the original link to the question in a human readable way. On StackPrinter i have this ...
12 votes
1 answer
348 views

How the /sites method is meant to be used

The /sites method is used to enumerate all sites in the network. If your [app] is meant to run against more than a single site (and many are) this method is how you should be discovering new sites in ...
5 votes
2 answers
2k views

API compliant request throttle implementations

Balancing compliance with Request Throttling Limits with maximum allowable throughput in our applications and libraries with any reliability requires self-throttling. This post is meant to be a repo ...
4 votes
8 answers
4k views

How to format reputation numbers similar to Stack Exchange sites

UPDATE For JavaScript, see CMS's implementation below. It is much more elegant than the one I provide in the body of this Q. // formats a number similar to the way stack exchange sites // ...
4 votes
0 answers
218 views

Announcement: StackExchange API Development Wiki

RIP August 24, 2010 - April 26, 2013 Due to lack of interest and the increasing burden of maintenance, I have decided to close down this wiki. Most of the information that it contains is either ...
3 votes
3 answers
249 views

How to monitor API version and site state

I want to make an application in which the used API will automatically be updated when a newer version is released. What is the procedure to check if a newer version is available or not? How can I ...
9 votes
7 answers
4k views

How to format time since xxx e.g. "4 minutes ago" similar to Stack Exchange sites

function timeSince(date) { var seconds = Math.floor((new Date() - date) / 1000); var interval = Math.floor(seconds / 31536000); if (interval > 1) { return interval + " years";...
3 votes
1 answer
129 views

How to check if a given question is changed

What is the fastest way to check if a question is changed using the API calls? For my purpose (a cache), a question is considered changed if: A new comment is added to the question or to any of its ...
3 votes
1 answer
99 views

How to generate a list of users ranked by bug report submissions.

The use case is to generate a list of bug report submissions, grouped by User, of the following counts in descending order: bug bug + status-completed bug + status-deferred bug + status-bydesign ...
3 votes
3 answers
155 views

How to generate a list of users ranked by activity (question or answer count).

The use case is to generate a list of users ordered by activity, i.e. question_count or answer_count. e.g. total_(questions|answers) display_name [user_id] ------------------------------------------ ...
3 votes
3 answers
288 views

How to calculate a list of users ranked by question favorite count totals.

The API provides methods to sort and filter individual questions by favorite count. In order to calculate the question favorite count totals per User, some grouping and set operations are required. ...
3 votes
2 answers
184 views

How to calculate a list of users ranked by question score (votes sum) totals.

The API provides methods to sort and filter individual questions by score. In order to calculate the question score (votes sum) totals per User, some grouping and set operations are required. e.g. ...
3 votes
2 answers
107 views

How to calculate a list of users ranked by question view count totals.

The API provides methods to sort and filter individual questions by view count. In order to calculate the question view count totals per User, some grouping and set operations are required. e.g. ...
4 votes
1 answer
115 views

How to retrieve notifications for a given user.

There seems to be a few of these "dev-tips" so I'll share a problem I have. To notify a user of comments directed to them, we use the users/{id}/mentioned method. However, notifying a user of ...
5 votes
2 answers
174 views

Simple Activity Monitor - For Educational Purposes only.

This Soapi.JS script, if abused is likely to provoke frowns from those whom you would like to see smiles. Note: the dataset is only valid if the entire user base is pulled, and on just about any ...
13 votes
0 answers
15k views

How to call the API via JSONP in Plain Old JavaScript

This tips demonstrates how to call the API in JavaScript without the need of jQuery or other frameworks. In a lot of cases you will find that the JSONP implementations provided in various frameworks ...
4 votes
0 answers
71 views

recommended buffer size for markdown fields is conservative

I ran into a truncation error while inserting user data into a database using the documented field length (buffer size) of 3000. So I redefined to nvarchar(max), pulled all users in the stack ...
9 votes
3 answers
216 views

Should we adjust the format of the dev-tip questions early on?

Update: I've 'averaged' the few answers and comments and included the respective result below each question (all results are executed accordingly for some time already in most dev-tip posts). The ...
6 votes
0 answers
175 views

How to get the count of a query efficiently

To get the count of a query without returning results, simply specify pagesize=0. http://api.stackoverflow.com/0.9/users?filter=mike&sort=name&pagesize=0 { "total": 1161, "page": 1, "...
3 votes
4 answers
177 views

How to order /sites result in a user friendly way to use it in our apps.

Since ordering of /sites is not guaranteed, how do i effectively order sites in a user-friendly way? General requirements: Trilogy must stay on the top of the list [stackoverflow.com,meta....
7 votes
0 answers
476 views

How to use min/max with sort

While some sort values make inference of the expected min/max values less than ambiguous, others do not. Pending formal documentation, I hope this can serve as an informal reference. Aggregated sort ...
4 votes
0 answers
1k views

Dev-Tip: How to call the API in C# and Silverlight

This tip shows a simple and reliable way to create HttpWebRequest that are configured to properly query the api. With the exception of the AutomaticDecompression assignment, this code can be used in ...