Are there any sentence links just like thesaurus links?

shahood

Is it possible to know from data retrieved from Entries endpoint whether a sense or subSense contained therein has more sentences available through Sentences endpoint?

It is just like every sense and subSense that has any thesaurus available through Thesaurus endpoint, will have thesaurusLinks right there in Entries endpoint data.

Although I haven't seen any sentence links in the data, i was hoping there might be any other way to achieve that objective. I want to display a More Sentences button with each sense and subSense but only if it really has any more sentences.

Pl point me in the right direction!

Simone

Hi @shahood
Oh, let me find out for you!
Bear with me.

AmosDuveen

Hi @shahood,

The answer is "sort of". I won't bore you with the historic reasons why it doesn't operate in the way you would like but I'll make a note that we ought to see if we can make it work that way in future (it will be quite a big project though and will depend on other projects we already have in the pipeline).

Meanwhile, what is currently available is links from the sentence dictionary to the corresponding dictionary sense so the way you would have to approach this would be to call on both sentence dictionary and entries endpoints and then match up the corresponding IDs (from the sentence dictionary response to the dictionary sense id).

shahood

@AmosDuveen thanks for the reply. It is exactly how I'm doing it currently. But it translates into 2 calls per word where the second call is just to decide whether or not to show the 'More Sentences' button. If I remove the requirement of this button, I can reduce the network calls by exactly 50% which is quite a lot. So, I thought I would ask the gurus for a better solution.

Removing the button can save on network calls but still I'll have to give the option for 'More Sentences' somewhere inside toolbar menus. And it will be annoying on the part of the user if she taps on More Sentences option and is served with a toast that more sentences are not available. The best solution was to have sentence links available just like thesaurus links.
Oh and that is one more scenario where ODAPI is different from Oxford website.

AmosDuveen

Like I said above, at this end we would also prefer it if the links worked differently but there are historic reasons why this is not currently possible. The website only functions as it does because of the ready availability of bulk data behind the scenes. You nevertheless still have access to all of the material.