plexjs/docs/sdks/search/README.md

Search

(search)

Overview

API Calls that perform search operations with Plex Media Server

Available Operations

• performSearch - Perform a search
• performVoiceSearch - Perform a voice search
• getSearchResults - Get Search Results

performSearch

This endpoint performs a search across all library sections, or a single section, and returns matches as hubs, split up by type. It performs spell checking, looks for partial matches, and orders the hubs based on quality of results. In addition, based on matches, it will return other related matches (e.g. for a genre match, it may return movies in that genre, or for an actor match, movies with that actor).

In the response's items, the following extra attributes are returned to further describe or disambiguate the result:

• reason: The reason for the result, if not because of a direct search term match; can be either:
  • section: There are multiple identical results from different sections.
  • originalTitle: There was a search term match from the original title field (sometimes those can be very different or in a foreign language).
  • <hub identifier>: If the reason for the result is due to a result in another hub, the source hub identifier is returned. For example, if the search is for "dylan" then Bob Dylan may be returned as an artist result, an a few of his albums returned as album results with a reason code of artist (the identifier of that particular hub). Or if the search is for "arnold", there might be movie results returned with a reason of actor
• reasonTitle: The string associated with the reason code. For a section reason, it'll be the section name; For a hub identifier, it'll be a string associated with the match (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger for movies which were returned because the search was for "arnold").
• reasonID: The ID of the item associated with the reason for the result. This might be a section ID, a tag ID, an artist ID, or a show ID.

This request is intended to be very fast, and called as the user types.

Example Usage

import { PlexAPI } from "@lukehagar/plexjs";

async function run() {
  const sdk = new PlexAPI({
    accessToken: "<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>",
    xPlexClientIdentifier: "<value>",
  });

  const query = "dylan";
  const sectionId = 1516.53;
  const limit = 5;
  
  const result = await sdk.search.performSearch(query, sectionId, limit);

  // Handle the result
  console.log(result)
}

run();

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description	Example
query	string	✔️	The query term	[object Object]
sectionId	number	➖	This gives context to the search, and can result in re-ordering of search result hubs
limit	number	➖	The number of items to return per hub	[object Object]
options	RequestOptions	➖	Used to set various options for making HTTP requests.
options.fetchOptions	RequestInit	➖	Options that are passed to the underlying HTTP request. This can be used to inject extra headers for examples. All Request options, except method and body, are allowed.

Response

Promise<operations.PerformSearchResponse>

Errors

Error Object	Status Code	Content Type
errors.PerformSearchResponseBody	401	application/json
errors.SDKError	4xx-5xx	/

performVoiceSearch

This endpoint performs a search specifically tailored towards voice or other imprecise input which may work badly with the substring and spell-checking heuristics used by the /hubs/search endpoint. It uses a Levenshtein distance heuristic to search titles, and as such is much slower than the other search endpoint. Whenever possible, clients should limit the search to the appropriate type. Results, as well as their containing per-type hubs, contain a distance attribute which can be used to judge result quality.

Example Usage

import { PlexAPI } from "@lukehagar/plexjs";

async function run() {
  const sdk = new PlexAPI({
    accessToken: "<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>",
    xPlexClientIdentifier: "<value>",
  });

  const query = "dead+poop";
  const sectionId = 4094.8;
  const limit = 5;
  
  const result = await sdk.search.performVoiceSearch(query, sectionId, limit);

  // Handle the result
  console.log(result)
}

run();

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description	Example
query	string	✔️	The query term	[object Object]
sectionId	number	➖	This gives context to the search, and can result in re-ordering of search result hubs
limit	number	➖	The number of items to return per hub	[object Object]
options	RequestOptions	➖	Used to set various options for making HTTP requests.
options.fetchOptions	RequestInit	➖	Options that are passed to the underlying HTTP request. This can be used to inject extra headers for examples. All Request options, except method and body, are allowed.

Response

Promise<operations.PerformVoiceSearchResponse>

Errors

Error Object	Status Code	Content Type
errors.PerformVoiceSearchResponseBody	401	application/json
errors.SDKError	4xx-5xx	/

getSearchResults

This will search the database for the string provided.

Example Usage

import { PlexAPI } from "@lukehagar/plexjs";

async function run() {
  const sdk = new PlexAPI({
    accessToken: "<YOUR_API_KEY_HERE>",
    xPlexClientIdentifier: "<value>",
  });

  const query = "110";
  
  const result = await sdk.search.getSearchResults(query);

  // Handle the result
  console.log(result)
}

run();

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description	Example
query	string	✔️	The search query string to use	[object Object]
options	RequestOptions	➖	Used to set various options for making HTTP requests.
options.fetchOptions	RequestInit	➖	Options that are passed to the underlying HTTP request. This can be used to inject extra headers for examples. All Request options, except method and body, are allowed.

Response

Promise<operations.GetSearchResultsResponse>

Errors

Error Object	Status Code	Content Type
errors.GetSearchResultsResponseBody	401	application/json
errors.SDKError	4xx-5xx	/