Hi Leslie,
Unfortunately the Petfinder API doesn’t have a method to filter results per shelter. There are only two methods that limit the search to a shelter – pet.getRandom and shelter.getPets. The random method only returns one result and the getPets method doesn’t allow for any filtering. I fake the filtering by retrieving all pets for a shelter and filtering through all the results to limit the data returned by animal and breed. For a shelter with 383 pets, this will probably be pretty slow. You can look through the Petfinder API methods available here: http://www.petfinder.com/developers/api-docs#methods
I wish the pet.find method had a shelter argument. This method would allow you to search by animal, breed, size, sex and age, but it returns pets listed by all shelters that match your arguments, which isn’t what most shelters/rescues want to do on their site.
I am going contact petfinder to see if they could add a method which will allow developers to filter shelter results. I’ll post back here if they answer.
You can limit the search by animal with my plugin, but I don’t know how fast it will be since you have so many animals listed. The shortcode would be:
[shelter_list animal=”cat” count=”400″] You’ll need to add the count because by default it only returns 75 results. This will probably be pretty slow though and the page would be really long. I have not included paging in my plugin yet, but it is something I can add when I have time.
Bridget
