hm there is something wrong in there indeed, I'll look into it, but basically there is a /mdapi/ missing, for example:

• invalid: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/branches
• valid: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/mdapi/branches

Nice. Useful service. Is it possible also to make JSON human readable?

If you add ?pretty=True at the end of the URL, it will be human readable.

That's not convenient - as a human I have no chance to know that, It would be better to return compressed stuff for ajax calls.

@techtonik you can install a browser plugin to make JSON pretty-printed by default. JSONovich is one for Firefox.

as a human I have no chance to know that

This is a 'bug' in the documentation, I mentioned it in my blog post: http://blog.pingoured.fr/index.php?post/2015/11/19/Introducing-mdapi but it's not on the index page, we should probably fix this.

It would be better to return compressed stuff for ajax calls.

What do you mean?

I mean why do this is returned in non human format in the first place? First reason that I hear is that this format is more compact and saves bandwidth. Second reason is that it saves memory and processing power. I find these two less important that human accessibility.

If that micro-optimizations are important (but think of minute of YouTube traffic) then it is possible to detect when resource is accessed by non-humans and return compressed form only for them. For example with
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17478731/whats-the-point-of-x-requested-with-header

And about http://blog.pingoured.fr/index.php?post/2015/11/19/Introducing-mdapi - looks like you have everything in place to test actual performance of ?pretty=True

Hm, 'mdapi' has "API' in the name. I think it would be a cool project to build a different site that queries the mdapi api and presents the data in a human readable way.

Do you have some funding for that?

I think it's less a matter of funding than a matter of interest. I wanted to build an api to expose as fast as possible the data present in the yum repositories, the goal of this api was to be usable for another web application: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages

On So, Nov 22, 2015 at 06:16:30 -0800, Ralph Bean wrote:

Hm, 'mdapi' has "API' in the name. I think it would be a cool project
to build a different site that queries the mdapi api and presents the
data in a human readable way.

IMHO it is nice to show human readable output if it is likely that a
human watches the output. Not sure if an extra project that just pretty
prints the output of mdapi to be able to easily unterstand it is worth
it. An idea to fuzzy match pretty print is shown in PR #2 (not tested).

Regards
Till

The original problem of this ticket has been solved in 2.2.2 now running in prod. I am therefore closing this ticket.
As for the discussion around the output returned, mdapi is not meant for human consumption, the prettified version of its output is merely there to facilitate the life of developer using it for the first time but is not meant to be used regularly. If it is such a big problem, I could also just remove it, after all it wasn't there before 2.0.

Thanks for your report.

PS: I'm now disabling tickets on github as mdapi is principally hosted on https://pagure.io/mdapi