AvatarEditorService:SearchCatalog() Group search is not working

AvatarEditorService is returning no search results when searching the Catalog for some groups on Roblox. Examples of some affected group names which have been reported to me are:

Repro:

local CSP = CatalogSearchParams.new()
CSP.CreatorName = 'AvaSky'
print(game:GetService('AvatarEditorService'):SearchCatalog(CSP):GetCurrentPage()) --// returns an empty array.

This seems to be affecting some groups only. Other groups, such as “Catalog Avatar Creator” are still working fine.

1 Like

Thank you for the report. We’ve assigned this to our team for review.

5 Likes

This is interesting. I’m guessing it’s been happening since the dawn of time for groups like these, and the reason is because Roblox assumes it’s the USER you’re looking up the UGC items for rather than the group. So with your repro script, it’d be searching up the catalog items for this user rather than the group:

This same behavior occurs with the catalog on the Roblox website, but by adding &CreatorType=Group to the browser URL you can search up a group’s UGC items even when a player exists with the same username.

This is somewhat of a separate ‘bug’ - if you want to call it that - or lack of a feature. More specifically, the CreatorType property is non-existent in CatalogSearchParams. This was likely an oversight when the SearchCatalog method was implemented and should be fixed up without the need for a feature request. This’ll then allow you to specify whether you want to search a groups’ items or a user’s items. The backend functionality already exists in the relevant APIs, it just needs to be added to the engine.

CC @starhiker13

3 Likes

Hi Muneeb.

This has been broken since I joined the company, thank you for bringing it up, we are looking at solving it in a holistic manner. When you specify a CreatorName without specifying a CreatorType, and there is a User and Group that exactly matches that name, we will only return you the creations made by the User. In many cases, the User has not created anything, which is why you get no results. The way to get around your issue is to specify a CreatorType = Group in the CatalogSearchParams, but I understand that currently it is not supported. We will work on a fix to update engine and the documentation, you would just need to update your studio / game-engine version when that is ready. Thank you for your feedback.

7 Likes

Can we possibly get a toggle for this in the Marketplace as well? It’s annoying having to put &CreatorType=Group in the URL manually as a workaround, so would be appreciated :slightly_smiling_face: