Season Browser

[SleepyMan]

Taiga's Season Browser was excellent as it allowed people to see what was upcoming and be able to add it to the Plan to Watch list. Now that this season's almost over, it is annoying to have to search for these things. It would be very nice to have it inside wmal like Taiga.

I don't know how they implement it though. Taiga seems to create its season database by filtering its anime database's items using the anime's start date. I don't know where it gets its anime database though... it reads from db\anime.xml but then when it updates I don't know where it gets it from. Does it keep the entire MAL database in it?

Edit: Well, I'm not sure if it uses this for the season browser, but it gets the upcoming animes by issuing a HTTP request to:
http://myanimelist.net/anime.php?sd=DAY&sm=MONTH&sy=YEAR&em=0&ed=0&ey=0&o=2&w=&c[]=a&c[]=d&cv=1
Start date (sd, sm, sy), End date (ed, em, ey), Order (o), Columns to display (c array), and two unknown (w and cv). Maybe we could filter this list to implement a season browser.

[z411]

Doesn't sound bad, but this sounds quite MAL-specific. I don't know if Hummingbird or Anilist plan to implement it.

[SleepyMan]

Well, apparently MAL doesn't do that, it's MALupdater and Taiga specific stuff. So it's possible to implement in the same way on all three (as long as it's able to fetch upcoming titles like based on a date range).
If there is ever an iMDb list, it would be awesome to see all upcoming movies and all.

[z411]

Well I looked a bit into Taiga's code and it seems he uses an .xml database for each season with the title, and IDs for both MAL and Hummingbird. I wonder if erengy updates the lists himself; sounds like quite a bit of work.

[MadeOfMagicAndWires]

Anilist has it's seasonal charts in the form of Anichart, but again, it's one service specific, and as far as I know it isn't reachable through the Anilist API.

[joshstar]

The AniList API offers browse/seasons, though this is not the same data set as AniChart it should be enough for something simple.

api/anime/browse/year/2014/winter?page=2

[GRMrGecko]

I think this will be an interesting feature.

[z411]

Instead of making a whole new season browser, I was thinking of adding an option to the currently existing Search/Add dialog to select date ranges or seasons, as VNDB's search supports the former, and AniList supports the latter (thank you Josh, very useful). Also maybe an option to choose a list view (like it is now) and a tiled view with covers (for those who like Taiga's season browser). I'll search for a way to do it with MAL and HB.

[zJoul]

MyAnimeList have launched its own season browser : http://myanimelist.net/anime/season

I don't know if there is an API, or if it's documented though.

[MadeOfMagicAndWires]

This just came to me, and is in a similar vein to @z411 's solution, but you could also solve the ID issue by just taking any season browser (can even be a third-party one, preferably one with an API, if one exists) implementing browsing that, and just adding a way to easily search by name for each entry.

Although not perfect this avoids using IDs all-together, so should be feasible with any API, and so also avoids issues where the show in question might not have been added to the specific databases yet.

I have no idea how far you're along with implementing this though, so just take my not-quite-showerthought as it is.

[z411]

This is a pretty old issue but it's currently being implemented in the develop branch. Please go test it if you want; it's pretty rudimentary so far but it should work.