batch add

[Robby Stephenson]

Sorry I didn't get a chance to get back to you sooner.

On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 9:01 PM Jared <list-tellico at legroom.net> wrote:

> I've successfully updated 8 games this run, with three no matches, and
> then I ran into the above.  Somehow updating not even a dozen games caused
> 360 requests.
>
> Is Tellico maybe doing a search for a match, then also searching for all
> details of all possible matches before it shows you the list of choices?
> That would somewhat explain the long delays and excessive queries.  Is that
> intended behavior?
>

Yes, that's essentially what's going on. The MobyGames is still one of the
more rudimentary searches and does title searching only at the moment. So
an update request uses the title of the game being updated, then receives
whatever results get sent back in the initial request and then grabs all
the other data to go along with each of those. Then, and only then, is when
it compares the existing game data against every result and decided which
one is the best match and if the match exceeds the threshold to be valid.

360 requests seems like a lot. The default is to request 10 results for
each search, then for each result (which is only a title), the specific
platform data has to be requested and then the cover image is another API
hit. So 8 games would be roughly 8*10*3, at a minimum.

The smart thing to do, and I'll put this on my list, is to cache some info
as well as try to be smarter about the update search. From your earlier
question, I need to figure out if adding the platform name would narrow
down the result list, for example. There's potential for efficiencies, too,
in avoiding unnecessary image downloads (which is probably taking a big
chunk of the time) and change the timing of that request until after the
match is found.


> or am I perhaps doing something wrong?  I'd be happy to describe my full
> process, but I'm basically just adding a bunch of games with (essentially)
> just Title and Platform, then multi-selecting them and selecting Update,
> MobyGames from the context menu.
>
> --
> Jared
>
> On 1/18/20 4:56 PM, Jared wrote:
>
> I ran into an odd issue when updating a new item from a data source.  It
> seems to affect:
>
> 1. any game entered with just a title
> 2. multiple possible matches in the data source
> 3. running an update against mobygames
>
> As an example, I created a new entry names Zool 2, a Jaguar game (among
> other platforms).  When I update the entry against mobygames, it takes
> about 30 seconds to return a list of matching games.  When updating a list
> of new games, that adds up to an awful lot of time spent waiting on search
> results.
>
> Couple additional notes:
>
> 1. This is MUCH slower than searching for a game using the Internet Search
> feature.  Not sure why the search behavior from the update process would be
> so much slower.
>
> 2. Once the matching game/platform are selected, it completes the update
> quickly, so this only seems to affect searching, not pulling data for a
> particular game.
>
> Any ideas what might be causing this?
>
> --
> Jared
>
>
> On 1/18/20 4:18 PM, Jared wrote:
>
> thanks!  I completely missed the import option.  Will give that a try.
>
> --
> Jared
>
> On 1/18/20 2:15 PM, Robby Stephenson wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 9:05 PM Jared <list-tellico at legroom.net> wrote:
>
>> is there a way to batch add items in tellico?  Eg., I already have a list
>> of, let's say, 100 games that I want to add.  Currently, I'm searching,
>> selecting, then adding them one at a time.  Instead of that, is there some
>> way to just feed it a list of titles and let it do the searching and adding
>> automatically?
>>
>
> Books can do that with adding multiple ISBNs at a time, for certain data
> source. But that's about the extent of batch addition.
>
>
>> or perhaps feed it a list of titles that it just adds with no additional
>> data, then use update sources on all of them?
>>
>
> Sure, just import a text file, single title per line, as a CSV. Then
> select multiple items and update from data source.
>
> Robby
>
>
>
>
>
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