Can I get the question id in the inbox route?

Question

My intended behavior of my app is to navigate the user the the question page when an inbox item gets clicked.

For example, when the API return a link like this https://stackapps.com/questions/8515/after-which-time-span-can-my-vote-no-longer-change/8517#8517 I navigate in my app to questions/8515/after-which-time-span-can-my-vote-no-longer-change/8517#8517 and everything works fine.
Here I can simply use the question id 8515 to navigate to the question and 8517#8517 to highlight the answer.

To come to my problem now. When I use the inbox route I'm interested in two item_types :

• new_answer
• comment

Both contain a link that for me is hard to use, because they don't contain the question id. e.g.:

• https://stackapps.com/a/8517?noredirect=1 (item_type: new_answer)
• https://stackapps.com/posts/comments/17601?noredirect=1 (item_type: comment)

Is there any way to figure out the question id of the answer / comment without making another request like answers by ids?

Answer 1

You can – sometimes. The default filter contains a question_id field, and according to the examples for the inbox_item type (you have to scroll down a bit) it is filled in some situations. I just tested it and the notification for this comment looks like this:

It should be populated for the new_answer type as well, but I couldn't test this quickly. It is not populated for notifications about comments to your answers; then, only the answer_id field is filed.