Slow responses using the Asana API - php

Question

Information
I've started using the Asana API to make our own task overview in our CMS. I found an API on github which helps me a great deal with this.
As I've mentioned in an earlier question, I wanted to get all tasks for a certain user. I've managed to do this using the code below.
public function user($id)
{
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) &&
($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] == 'XMLHttpRequest')) {
$this->layout = 'ajax';
}
$asana = new Asana(array(
'apiKey' => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
));
$results = json_decode($asana->getTasksByFilter(array(
'assignee' => $id,
'workspace' => 'xxxxxxxxxx'
)));
if ($asana->responseCode != '200' || is_null($results)) {
throw new \Exception('Error while trying to connect to Asana, response code: ' . $asana->responseCode, 1);
}
$tasks = array();
foreach ($results->data as $task) {
$result = json_decode($asana->getTaskTags($task->id));
$task->tags = $result->data;
$tasks[] = $task;
}
$user = json_decode($asana->getUserInfo($id));
if ($asana->responseCode != '200' || is_null($user)) {
throw new \Exception('Error while trying to connect to Asana, response code: ' . $asana->responseCode, 1);
}
$this->render("tasks", array(
'tasks' => $tasks,
'title' => 'Tasks for '.$user->data->name
));
}
The problem
The above works fine, except for one thing. It is slower than a booting Windows Vista machine (very slow :) ). If I include the tags, it can take up to 60 seconds before I get all results. If I do not include the tags it takes about 5 seconds which is still way too long. Now, I hope I am not the first one ever to have used the Asana API and that some of you might have experienced the same problem in the past.

Answer 1

The API itself could definitely be faster, and we have some long-term plans around how to improve responsiveness, but in the near-to-mid-term the API is probably going to remain the same basic speed.
The trick to not spending a lot of time accessing the API is generally to reduce the number of requests you make and only request the data you need. Sometimes, API clients don't make this easy, and I'm not familiar with the PHP client specifically, but I can give an example of how this would work in general with just the plain HTTP queries.
So right now you're doing the following in pseudocode:
GET /tasks?assignee=...&workspace=...
foreach task
GET /task/.../tags
GET /users/...
So if the user has 20 tasks (and real users typically have a lot more than 20 tasks - if you only care about incomplete and tasks completed in the last, say, week, you could use ?completed_since=<DATE_ONE_WEEK_AGO>), you've made 22 requests. And because it's synchronous, you wait a few seconds for each and every one of those requests before you start the next one.
Fortunately, the API has a parameter called ?opt_fields that allows you to specify the exact data you need. For example: let's suppose that for teach task, all you really want is to know the task ID, the task name, the tags it has and their names. You could then request:
GET /tasks?assignee=...&workspace=...&opt_fields=name,tags.name
(Each resource included always brings its id field)
This would allow you to get, in a single HTTP request, all the data you're after. (Well, the user lookup is still separate, but at least that's just 1 extra request instead of N). For more information on opt_fields, check out the documentation on Input/Output Options.
Hope that helps!