[Feature Request] support filter non pre-release versions by api

[Saafo]

Request the /api/{namespace}/{extension}/versions api to add a parameter isPreRelease to filter pre-release versions or non-pre-release versions. So that IDEs can figure out that whether the installed extension is the newest in (non-)pre-release versions.

[aboukhal]

It's quite curious to see that this simple feature doesn't seem to exist yet. I believe the version-references endpoint might be better suited for the added information, though.

It would be great to request information more efficiently as to not hit rate limits by potentially having to request dozens of versions for extensions that publish dailies with few actual releases in between.

[Saafo]

Yes, I'm worrying about rate limit and performance. Requesting dozens of version-references is not performant acceptable.

[aboukhal]

Both version-references endpoint return an array with some metadata for the version. For example download URLs, target platform, etc. If an additional field preRelease could be added (see the {version} endpoint), that would already be sufficient for my use case. That way our cron job can pull the newest releases for approved integrations daily and publish them into our internal OpenVSX registry without too much overhead and without being an unnecessary burden to the upstream registry. In an ideal world, there would also be a query parameter for the endpoint to filter the returned elements. But since query parameters are not used in the API yet, as far as I can see, I guess it's asking too much to start now :-D

The issue even translates to the UI. As a user I have to click through every entry in the drop-down to find the newest release version.

[cgruver]

Here is a filter using jq that you can use to just retrieve preRelease: false

curl -X GET 'https://open-vsx.org/api/v2/-/query?extensionId=redhat.java&includeAllVersions=true&targetPlatform=linux-x64&size=100&offset=0' -H 'accept: application/json' | jq '.extensions[] | select(.preRelease==false)'

[cgruver]

Do this to just get the first extension data

curl -X GET 'https://open-vsx.org/api/v2/-/query?extensionId=redhat.java&includeAllVersions=true&targetPlatform=linux-x64&size=100&offset=0' -H 'accept: application/json' | jq '.extensions[] | select(.preRelease==false)' | jq -s '.[0]'

[aboukhal]

Some plugins push preReleases daily and have way more than 100 releases between versions. This is still an interesting approach, thanks for the idea. I'll play around a bit with that to see if it works well enough for our use cases.

[cgruver]

@aboukhal The 100 is just illustrative. In practice, I had to make it 200 for my particular bundle of extensions that I'm pushing into my self hosted registry.

[Saafo]

200 is not enough. Just try getting first 50 non pre-releases versions of rust-analyzer

[cgruver]

@Saafo If you are trying to retrieve a large number of release versions, this query probably won't work for you.

I am using it just to find the latest release. I did have to increase the number of object to 500 for one particular extension.

This API call is a workaround, not a solution.

[netomi]

Please take a look at the PR #1692 , it adds an additional query parameter preReleases to the version-references endpoints that controls what versions are returned:

• true: only return preReleases
• false: exclude preReleases
• null / omitted: return all releases as now

also the version-references result is sorted to it should allow the latest non-preRelease / preRelease version for an extension.