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What is a user_id?
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Tim
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Jun 26, 2013 10:12AM
I'm trying to use book.show_by_isbn, I've looked through all the API docs and many discussion threads here and I can't find a decent description of what the "user_id" field is actually supposed to be. The ID shown on your profile page (mine is 21671016-tim-zook) doesn't seem to work, and there is no description of where I should be going to get this ID. I would really recommend documenting this part of the API more thoroughly, but in the meantime can someone let me know what exactly the user_id is and how to get it?
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its the numerical part of that string. Sorry the docs are unclear!I'd typical get it from looking at a user's profile url, but it's returned as part of many API calls also.
Ah, I see, thank you Michael.However, I still seem to be having problems getting the "json with callback" example shown on the API page to work. I've seen on some of the other threads that you've mentioned that some parts of the API documentation are out of date, is that section still valid?
To be more specific about my problem, if I insert my user_id into the example URL it would be "http://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn?ca...", but no matter how I make the request this URL always seems to redirect to the book page "http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53..." instead of giving me anything useful. Is there something I'm missing here? I was under the impression that this was simply reading data and not writing to a private account so OAuth was not required, am I incorrect to think this?
You need to include your public key. JSONP will make your key public, so if someone steals it and abuses it we might disable access.
I can only assume that the "public key" you mentioned is my "developer key", because it's the only key I have in relation to a "secret key".However I believe what my problem was is that I had not yet applied for a developer key. I didn't actually have to append my developer key to the query (as stated in your docs for book.show_by_isbn) but I guess I needed to have it set up and attached to my user_id because now that URL that was not working yesterday is now working.
Anyway, thank you for your help, Michael. You guys have a nice API but I hope you get time to improve the documentation and add more json endpoints soon :)
