In practical use, if an application uses the API as the primary data source, even with caching there is still a large amount of data being returned for most queries with Gurbani in them. There should be an option to only return specific fields. As an example, when displaying a given shabad, the only relevant fields that need to be queried are the text values for the gurmukhi, translation, and transliteration for each pangti. This can add up to a lot of wasted bandwidth and processing power.

The bani that is classified as Guru Tegh Bahadhur Ji's Saloks, Bhagat Kabeer Ji's Saloks, etc. are all attached to a single hymn ID. This may have been by design can be useful in some cases but there should be a better way to organize the Saloks, such as an additional salok ID attached to the pangtis that are in a Salok, so that specific Saloks can be retrieved without pulling them all. This can probably be achieved by limiting the results in the hymn to line numbers within a range of the searched-for pangti but that would be hackish and not guaranteed to be correct.

I was looking at iGurbani app which you have for demo and it seems not working. I looked into the cause of the issue and i found that api is not responding to the search by first letters.

I was trying using following url for api search:
http://api.sikher.com/search/1/abskb

and i getting response on the page as follows:
The page or endpoint you requested could not be found

I think this is worth putting up as an issue, even if the timeframe isn't as immediate. Regardless of the concerns of the quality of meta-data or character formatting of associated with the other datasets (if that's still an issue), the data for the Gurmukhi exists in ASCII, and so it should be added to this project. There are several translation languages in the version 2.2 of this database that are still machine translations, and so, from the perspective of quality and accuracy, they too are sub-par, but the goal of a project like this should be to encourage further development of the existing resources that we already have, and so adding in other datasets can only be a boon for developers and sangat alike.

By @irvanjit:
Proposing additional fields to the Melodies table that will contain additional information on the raag, of a musical nature. This information is crucial for the individual reading/singing a given shabad who wishes to sing it as prescribed by the Guru. A suggested and reputable datasource would be vismaadnaad.org (an example can be found here: http://vismaadnaad.org/Siree-Raag.php)

Also, as an aside, since some shabads in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji have also been assigned a 'ghar' (tabla taal), a complete database ought to account for that information as well. A table such as Rhythm would work, although most shabads would get a null value for associated Rhythm.

Can we add HTTPS for api.sikher.com?

I use the API for a hukamnama display site. It has been working pretty nicely. Thanks for that. I'd like to convert the site over to HTTPS. Having the api.sikher.com site be HTTP only is a problem, since I can't make http requests on an HTTPS site. I can try to proxy it, but I'd like to avoid that if we can just add the feature that would benefit all.

Thanks for all the hard work!

For example, it might make sense to be able to just type in the name of a field alongside resolving an integer.

For example, the search query type for first letters anywhere could be '/search/letters-anywhere' instead of /search/1/

Fields this could apply to could include: the search query type, translation id, transliteration id, random type, melody id, author id, language id

Hukumnama from Sri Darbar Sahib, with /today for today's & /yyyymmdd for date-specific.

Thanks,