Searching for another book by its identifier

[jacobalbano]

Hey all, couldn't find any other topic that answered my question, hopefully I didn't miss anything.

The plugin I'm writing is intended to be able to automatically copy metadata from the first book in a series over to later installments. So for example, I'd import a book with the identifier of "wxyz:1234-2" (this is a custom format that includes the series and volume number), and it would automatically search for the first entry in that series and copy its series name, authors, tags, etc.

However, I can't figure out any way to actually find books in the database from their identifiers. The API does have a field that seems likely, but for some reason it's empty. My tags display with no issue, and I do indeed have books in my library that already have identifiers set.

>>> db.all_field_names('tags')
frozenset({'Manga', 'GOG', 'Novel', 'Aozora', 'Amazon'})
>>> db.all_field_names('identifiers')
frozenset()
>>>

Am I missing something obvious? Any pointers would be appreciated

[jacobalbano]

Seems like I can get what I want by using

db.search('identifiers:wxyz:1234-1')

which gives me a set containing the book's id. I'll go with this solution unless someone comes up with a better one, but I still wonder if the cache is buggy when it comes to identifiers.

[kovidgoyal]

all_field_names is for many-to-one or many-to-many fields. identifiers is not one of them. identifiers are intended to be unique per book. Using search is fine for this use case.

[jacobalbano]

That makes sense! I figured since it didn't raise an error (as it would have if I'd used a field name that didn't exist at all) that there was some way to do it that I wasn't understanding. Thank you for the confirmation