Question

I’m at a logical roadblock on how to implement something I’m doing. I’m working with the Instagram API(not important to this question) and in their JSON response they give you 20 results and a link to the next 20 results. I’m trying to build an OOP library that can get the response from the initial API call, search if it has a “next_url” value, and if it does, get the next 20 responses and so un until there’s no longer an next URL. I can’t quite gather the logic on how to do this…

currently here’s the code to get the the first 20…

function __apiCall($url, $post_parameters = FALSE) {

        $curl_session = curl_init();

        curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

        if($post_parameters !== FALSE) {
            curl_setopt ($curl_session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_parameters);
        }

        // Return the curl results to a variable
        curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

        curl_setopt($curl_session, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, $this->codeigniter_instance->config->item('instagram_ssl_verify'));

        $contents = curl_exec ($curl_session);

        curl_close ($curl_session);

        $return = json_decode($contents);
        return $return;


    }

and here’s a snippet from the JSON response….

    stdClass Object
(
    [pagination] => stdClass Object
        (
            [next_url] => https://api.instagram.com/v1/locations/3937885/media/recent?min_timestamp=&min_id=&max_timestamp=&access_token=xxxxxxxxxxxx49414762bea69258210d8872&max_id=133226850290424667_21341717
            [next_max_id] => 133226850290424667_21341717
        )

    [meta] => stdClass Object
        (
            [code] => 200
        )

    [data] => Array
        (
            [0] => stdClass Object
                (
                    [tags] => Array
                        (
                        )

                    [type] => image
                    [location] => stdClass Object
                        (
                            [latitude] => 39.95022
                            [name] => Neiman Group
                            [longitude] => -75.168322
                            [id] => 3937885
                        )

                    [comments] => stdClass Object
                        (
                            [count] => 0
                            [data] => Array
                                (
                                )

                        )

Answer 1

function getResults($url)
{
    $gotAllResults = false;
    $results = array();

    while(!$gotAllResults) {
        $result = $this->__apiCall($url);
        $results[] = $result;

        if (!property_exist($result->pagination, 'next_url') {
            $gotAllResults = true;
        } else {
            $url = $result->pagination->next_url;
        }
    }

    return $results;
}

function __apiCall($url)
{
        // settings for cURL

        $contents = curl_exec($curl_session);

        curl_close ($curl_session);

        $result = json_decode($contents);
        return $return;
}

BTW. Why are you using two underscores in the name of your __apiCall function. That makes me think something magical is happening.