How to search for a playlist item with a video ID when more than 50 playlist items exist - youtube-api

Question

When searching for a playlist item with a specific video ID, the youtube-api seems to only search among the 50 latest playlist items.
I have over 1000 items on my playlist and searching for a item for a certain video ID yields no results. I am therefor forced to fetch all the items on the playlist and iterate overthem my self to find the specific item.
// This only searches among the first 50 playlist items
$videoId = 'ASDFQWER';
$playlistId = 'ASDFASDFQWERQWER';
$part = "contentDetails";
$response = $youtube->playlistItems->listPlaylistItems(
$part,
array(
"playlistId" => $playlistId,
"videoId" => $videoId,
)
);
$playlistItem = reset($response->getItems());
// This works, but is slow and awkward
$videoId = 'ASDFQWER';
$playlistId = 'ASDFASDFQWERQWER';
$part = "contentDetails";
$playlistItems = array();
$nextPageToken = NULL;
do {
$response = $youtube->playlistItems->listPlaylistItems(
$part,
array(
"playlistId" => $playlistId,
"maxResults" => 50,
"pageToken" => $nextPageToken,
)
);
$nextPageToken = $response->getNextPageToken();
$playlistItems = array_merge($playlistItems, $response->getItems());
} while ($nextPageToken);
$hasVideoId = function($playlistItem) use ($videoId){
$idOnItem = $playlistItem->getContentDetails()->getVideoId();
return ($videoId == $idOnItem);
};
$playlistItem = reset(array_filter($playlistItems, $hasVideoId));
I would prefer to use the video's ID for doing the search at YouTube's end rather than fetching all the items in chuncks of 50 items and searching all those.
The point in all this is to automate the removal of old videos. If I only delete the video there will be invalid items on my playlist. And that's why I need to find these playlist items, so I can remove them along with the videos.
I first opened an issue at GitHub for the PHP-client, but this really doesn't seem to be an issue on the client.
Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

You're right in that the issue doesn't lie in the client; all clients as well as the API explorer exhibit it as well. My guess is that this is a by-product of the fact that playlistItems, as opposed to most of the objects that the API can access, have an order to them, and so this behavior implies that the underlying logic is one that iterates sequentially through the playlist.
However, here are a couple of things to think about. First of all, if all you're doing is grabbing the contentDetails, I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the code snippet, as the contentDetails part for a playlistItem object only returns the videoId (which you already have). It may be, of course, that you've just simplified things for this post, and you're actually going to be retrieving other parts. But is there something unique that's requiring you to use the playlistItems endpoint? Since you already have the videoId, you could just use the videos->list endpoint and get nearly all the info that you get with the playlistItems ... in fact, the only thing you'd be missing is the position of the video in the playlist (but if THAT'S what you're after, then your second example above is probably your best bet right now).