A04 CS426 [Movie Recommendations]

3rd Party APIs Used:

• TheMovieDB API aka TMDB API
• MediaWiki (Wikipedia) API

Description:

Loads into a page with Recommendation categories in a Nav bar on left, auto-populates with popular movies. You can choose a genre to get its recommended movies.

You can click on any movie poster to go to its page where the poster is shown on the left and the movie trailer on the top right with a list of its actors below the trailer.

Clicking on any actor name will take you to their wikipedia page, if its available.

For TMDB API:

Function fetchMovieDetails(movieId) is used to fetch movie details from TMDB API by sending a GET request to the following URL: https://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/${movieId}.

TMDB API is to fetch recommended movies based on genre and also to gather information about the movie cast (actors). This information is used to display movie details, recommended movies, and cast members on the pages.

For MediaWiki(Wikipedia) API

MediaWiki (Wikipedia) API: This is used to search for a page on Wikipedia based on the name of an actor. If a page is found, the URL for that Wikipedia page is created.

Function fetchActorWikiPage(actorName) is used to search for an actor’s Wikipedia page by sending a GET request to 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php' and passing URLSearchParameters in the format 'action': 'query', 'list': 'search', 'srsearch': actorName, 'format': 'json', 'origin': '*'.

The search results are then parsed to extract the first match (assuming the most relevant result is the first one), construct a URL to that Wikipedia page and return it. This Wikipedia URL is then added to the anchor element (<a>) for each actor, which is then clickable and opens the actor's Wikipedia page on click.

API Reference

Fetch Movie details

  GET /3/movie/${movieId}

Parameter	Type	Description
api_key	string	Required. Your API key
language	string	Language parameter to get data in desired language
language	string	Allows to add more data in the response (e.g. images, credits)

Fetch Actor Wikipedia page details

  GET /w/api.php

Parameter	Type	Description
action	string	Required. Type of action to be performed
list	string	Decides the type of list
srsearch	string	Name of the actor
format	string	Structure format of the response
origin	string	Ensures CORS support

fetchActorWikiPage(actorName)

Takes the actor's name and returns the Wikipedia link of the actor's page.

Documentation for API:

• https://developer.themoviedb.org/docs/authentication-application
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

Screenshots

Home

Horror-Genre Recommendations

Movie Details Page

Linked Wikipedia Actor Page