Support efficient requests for multiple elements at once

[rhomeister]

It is currently not possible to retrieve multiple elements at once. For instance, if I want to download all nodes relating to a relation, I have to load all its ways first, and then all corresponding nodes. Each element generates a HTTP get request. As a result, a relation consisting of say 10 ways with 10 nodes each requires 111 HTTP get requests.

The API, however, supports the retrieval of multiple elements at once:

"Multi fetch: GET /api/0.6/[nodes|ways|relations]?#parameters
Allows a user to fetch multiple elements at once.
Parameters
[nodes|ways|relations]=comma separated list
The parameter has to be the same in the URL (e.g. /api/0.6/nodes?nodes=123,456,789)"
(from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6)

It would be really nice if your API could implement methods like "api.find_nodes([1,2,3,4,5])" to get multiple elements at once.

[freundchen]

Hello,

sorry for not getting back to you earlier - we are developing rosemary on a as-needed-basis for our website http://www.wheelmap.org - until now we didn't have the need for batch operations ourselves. Since they are already supported by the OSM API, they should not be too hard to add, so why don't you fork and try yourself? We will be happy to accept a pull request or give feedback on it.

Cheers