Source

Hi Steemians!

This will be a little post that might save developers a bunch of their time.

As many of you already know, me and @lino are the creators of the upcoming platform @gaamit dedicated to game developers, so we are leveraging Steemit API's to interact with the blockchain.

Steemit API's work very well, but the documentation is quite scarce. One of the basic tasks we had to accomplish is getting, for instance, the feed coming from the "new" section of a particular tag ("gamedev" in our case).

Using steem-js we first tried with getState:

steem.api.getState('/created/gamedev', function(err, result) {
    console.log(err, result);
});

First thing to notice: "created" stands for "new" category. This call goes fine, but there is no way of retrieving a certain amount of posts from here. We need something more specific.

Get Discussions By Created (straight from the docs) seems the correct one:

steem.api.getDiscussionsByCreated(query, function(err, result) {
  console.log(err, result);
});

Cool! But, wait.. what "query" parameter stands for? We haven't managed to find a documentation about this parameter, but in the examples folders from the GitHub account we managed to find something (server.js):

steem.api.getDiscussionsByActive({
  limit: 10,
  start_author: 'thecastle',
  start_permlink: 'this-week-in-level-design-1-22-2017'
}, function(err, result) {
    console.log(err, result);
});

So now we know something about that "query" parameter. Last thing we need is a way to get feed from "gamedev" tag. We guessed that "tag" would have worked, so we tried it.. and indeed it worked.

So, the ultimate call is the following:

steem.api.getDiscussionsByCreated({
  limit: 10,
  start_author: 'thecastle',
  start_permlink: 'this-week-in-level-design-1-22-2017',
  tag: 'gamedev'
}, function(err, result) {
    console.log(err, result);
});

Where:

• limit stands for the number of posts to retrieve
• start_author is the author of the last post we want to start from (you must specify also start_permlink!)
• start_permlink is the permlink of the last post we want to start from (you must specify also start_author!)
• tag will be "gamedev" in our case

You can use the same format for getDiscussionsByHot and getDiscussionsByTrending.

Let me know if you can point out some good resources about this topic, so we can share them with the community

Thanks for reading!