Show more than one day of "Soon offline"

[dagwieers]

At the moment we only list what will go offline today because the query is by date.
It would be nice if it worked like Most recent and shows a list that extends beyond today.

Probably best to show what goes offline by date, i.e. page 1 shows today, page 2 shows tomorrow, page 3 shows the day after tomorrow. So that you have a good indication when a new day has started.

The typical More... button would then become Today (if you go back), Tomorrow, Thursday 2019-07-18, etc...

Alternatively, we could just have a continuous list like Most recent and insert placeholders stating --- Tomorrow ---, --- Thursday, 2019-07-18 ---

[mram65]

Personally, I think it would work best like "most recent."
I just checked this behavior, and it looks fine.
When you hover over an item (or select it), then you can see the remaining date/time on your left side.

[dagwieers]

@mram65 I agree, but the VRT NU API doesn't allow for this easily. You can only get a list of things that will disappear for a specific date AFAICT. Feel free to try this for yourself, because most of what we found was by playing around with options: https://github.com/add-ons/plugin.video.vrt.nu/wiki/VRT-NU-API

If we find a single API call that returns "soon offline" content by recent first we could integrate this easily, otherwise this requires calls, merging and keeping offsets for every page, which is quite messy and inefficient. (caching helps, but still...)

[mram65]

A continuous list like "most recent" just seemed like the best solution to me (because it is clearer in use).

But in any case, it's best to keep the implementation simple. And indeed, only use the functions of the API, even if the result looks different.

A split in one page per day, as initially explained, is then better.

[mediaminister]

It's totally possible to have a continuous list. Requesting a list of all programs that will disappear the next seven days is easy and sorting this list in Python on the assetOffTime key ensures the list items are shown in the right order.

The difficulty is that the caching system uses separate files and requests to the VRT NU API for every page in the GUI. It would be easier to request the complete list in one go and cache this full list in one file and filter this list using indices in Python when the user requests a page.

@dagwieers Is there a good reason that the caching system uses separate files?

[dagwieers]

The caching system was originally designed for individual HTTP requests, and does not merge HTTP requests. The reason for this is that it is easier to keep track of cache invalidation.

@mediaminister Can you provide me with the HTTP request for e.g. the next seven days? I could not make this work, I could only make it work for a single day, which would require to either merge the output, or reprocess everything for building each new page.

[mediaminister]

Please take a look at my draft PR. This is the http request:
https://vrtnu-api.vrt.be/search?i=video&facets[assetOffTime]=[2020-07-23,2020-07-24,2020-07-25,2020-07-26,2020-07-27,2020-07-28,2020-07-29]&facets[programBrands]=[een,canvas,sporza,vrtnws,radio1,radio2,klara,stubru,mnm,vrtnxt,de-warmste-week,vrt-events1,vrt-events2,vrt-events3]&size=300

[dagwieers]

@mediaminister Go for it, this works much better and probably fixes 95% of what people need.