Please add tags to answers

Question

Update: This was completed as of API version 2.1.

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When querying any API method which returns answers (/users/ids/answers, /answers/ids, etc.) the result does not include the tag information for the related question.

The API does not support filtering answers by tag, but querying for a user's answers is a relatively inexpensive operation for all but the most prolific users. These can subsequently be filtered/sorted without need for additional API calls if the tag data were included for each answer result.

I feel this would add great value to the data without needing to pull all the questions.

Answer 1

Hmmm... this is an interesting problem.

Just going off of usage statistics, nearly everybody is grabbing answers as part of /questions/{id} or /questions. This strongly suggests that what use of */answers there is, is largely independent of corresponding question (if I had to guess, I'd say its generally user analytics of some sort).

However, one of the points of */answers is to allow for an optimization in which you skip the corresponding */questions call. Obviously this doesn't work if you want to keep tags in sync.

This is very much "on the margin," ultimately. If better response filtering schemes pan out in a subsequent API version, this will probably be done; if not it probably won't.

In other words, I'd say returning tags on an answer is a waste of bandwidth in the common case but there's a sufficiently valid use case such that an optional return has merit. I'm putting this on the "re-evaluate at a later date" list.