batch add

[Robby Stephenson]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 12:35 AM Jared <list-tellico at legroom.net> wrote:

> On 1/23/20 8:11 PM, Robby Stephenson wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks, Robby.  I do appreciate you looking into this and providing some
> additional details.  Yeah, Moby Games definitely doesn't have the most
> flexible or comprehensive API, but unlike almost every other site I've
> tried to use for this effort (both with and without Tellico) it's by far
> the most consistent in terms of stability and availability.  They do win
> pretty big points for that.  :-)
>

Not to imply anything negative about MobyGames - I just haven't implemented
much complexity into Tellico's usage of it, as you can tell.

I was playing around with the API a little more to see if I could find any
> ways to make the workflow of adding new games more efficient.  For my
> initial use case of bulk-loading Tellico, I'm creating CSV files with all
> game and platform names (verifying in advance that the platform name I use
> in the CSV file matches the Tellico's hardcoded names), and from there
> running an Update against MobyGames for the newly added games.
>
> Note:  I'm certain you already know most of the details here and this is
> nothing really new, but I figured taking you through my thought process
> here might provide some ideas how to potentially make things a little more
> efficient.
>
> MobyGames does let you include the platform ID with searches, but it's not
> very intuitive.  Best I can tell, you need to provide the platform ID
> rather than name:
>
>
> https://api.mobygames.com/v1/games?api_key=$APIKEY&title=Basketball&platform=28
>
> That'll return Basketball titles released for Atari 2600.  You'd need some
> internal mapping of mobygames platform IDs to include that with your first
> search, but it instantly narrows the list of results down to the target
> platform.
>

That's a good idea. The mapping wouldn't be an issue. Thanks for digging
into that.

Robby
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/tellico-users/attachments/20200124/1f3aa400/attachment.html>