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Finding things (and the right amount)

Source: vignettes/finding-things.Rmd
finding-things.Rmd

Item identifiers

The id parameter is used to identify shows, movies or people. In each of these cases, the value of the parameter must be a valid ID of one of the following kinds:

  • Trakt ID (trakt): A numeric ID used by trakt.tv, which is included as a variable named trakt by every function for an output item. These IDs are unique for their respective category (or type, e.g. shows, movies, people, …) and can be expected to have full coverage, meaning that every item will have a category-specific Trakt ID.
  • Slug (slug): A human-readable identifier used on the trakt.tv site, e.g. the-wire. While these are easy to remember, they have the risk of clashing with numeric IDs. One example is the show “24”, which has the slug 24. However, the show “Presidio Med” has the Trakt ID 24, so if you supply id = 24 the API assumes you meant the Trakt ID instead of the slug. This is… suboptimal. Use trakt ID’s whenever possible in any sort of user-facing application or batch-processing.
  • IMDb ID (imdb): Relatively self-explanatory. You can retrieve them easily via most functions or by searching on IMDb.com. Since IMDb is an external service, these IDs should be used for linking with other data sources rather than as search parameters for the trakt API, as it can not be guaranteed that every item on trakt.tv does have an IMDb ID.

The API does return some additional IDs, notably for the tvdb. These are useful for linking with other data sources like fanart.tv. They are not used as search parameters for the trakt API. The API also includes a TVRage ID, but since this site seems to not exist anymore (and therefore newer items don’t have this ID) this ID is removed from all output.

Extended Information:

The extended parameter controls the amount of information (i.e. the number of variables) included in the output.

  • "min": The default option returns minimal information. For shows, movies, episodes and people, the result will only include a title or name, possibly a year, and the standard set of IDs (see section above). This is the fastest option as it requires less content to be sent from the API and less post-processing work to produce tabular output.
  • "full": The maximum amount of information. This option is required if you are interested in the votes and rating variables, as well as additional metadata like air dates, plot summaries, and a plethora of other variables depending on the type. If you intend on retrieving data for a large number of items, e.g. via [popular_media], it is highly recommend to cache the output locally when using extended = "full" and subsequently only use extended = "min". Then you can merge or [dplyr::left_join()] the minimal data with your cached data.