Section ID API that can be used with 3rd party apps

Feature Suggestions
1

I'm not sure if this is already possible, but i'm looking into how 3rd party downloading apps like sickbeard, sickrage and couch potato can identify just the section it has added a file into and just refresh that particular section instead of updating every single section of that category, as part of it's post-processing.

 

Currently the update plex function updates all TV Show sections (as an example) and depending on how many of that category one has in their library, it can be an unnecessarily heavy load on plex. If it could know that by putting the file in a parent folder that is assigned to a particular section, then it would make refreshing plex quicker and less demanding.

 

Are there any section identifiers that can be used for external apps?

 

thanks

2

I haven't tried it myself, but this
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201242707-Plex-Media-Scanner-via-Command-Line
should give you some hints.

3

There is also

http://[PMS_IP_ADDRESS]:32400/library/sections/29/refresh

and

http://[PMS_IP_ADDRESS]:32400/library/sections/29/refresh?force=1

Not sure how the other programs would get the section number but if it can, this will work.

4

thanks for the replies.

Does plex give a unique identifier for each section, or generalise into the predefined categories?

ie, i have 3 sections of various types of TV Shows, all using the TV Shows category format:

Documentary Series

TV Shows

Kid's TV Shows

Do each of those sections get a unique ID, or are they all clumped into one ID as they are all simply classed under the "TV Shows" category?

My library has 18 sections in it for various reasons and what i'm finding is that when these 3rd party apps sends a refresh command to my library it will update all those sections appertaining to a particular category. So a file that has been put into Documentary Series will refresh Documentary series, tv shows and kid's tv shows.

This can impact the server heavily.

What would be nice is if these 3rd party apps can identity that it is actually ID14 (for example, documentary series) that it needs to update and not ID14,15,16......

5

Libraries have 2 identifiers

1 - ID, which is unique and just increments as you create them so the latest will usually have the highest number

2 - mediatype, which are set values and indicates if it is a movie, tv show, photo, or music

My guess is that the programs are not able to determine the ID since these will be unique and the programs do not want to bother trying to match them to the folder that is being modified.  The easy method is for them to use the mediatype which is easy to determine.

6

Early 2021 clean-up: implemented