I'm sure a lot of you noticed the new IMDb feature: character pages. You can see a complete description in this thread (requires a free registration): http://akas.imdb.com/board/bd0000040/reply/86514303
And an example of these pages here: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000001/ As you can see, it's a really cool feature, and I'm wondering if it should be supported by IMDbPY (and if it's possible at all, for instance). Looking at the overall design, this means a new Character class, almost identical to the Person class. Instances of Person class will change, and the person.currentRole will be no more a unicode string, but a Character instance. Similarly, instances of Character will have a character.currentPlayer (the name of the attribute is still to be defined) which will be a Person instance. So far - more or less - so good: a bit of refactoring but nothing impossible. It's easy to support the data for the 'http', 'httpThin' and 'mobile' data access systems; the real problems come with 'local' and 'sql'. I assume there are no plans to include these information in the plain text data files, so our options are limited. We can completely ignore the support for character: Person instances will still have a Character object in person.currentRole, but there will be no imdb_access.get_character() and imdb_access.search_character() methods, and imdb_access.update(character) will do nothing or raise an exception. Honestly I _really_ dislike such a "solution": IMDbPY always was, as long as the information were there, _independent_ by the source of the data, and this would be a major departure from this spirit. [local] Taking a fast look at the 'local' support: the actors.list and actresses.list need to be parsed to create some files: - characters.index: map a "characterID" (equivalent of a personID) to an offset in the characters.data file. - characters.data containing fields in a format like this: CHARACTER_ID: the ID of this character. BIT: a bit, 0 for actors.list and 1 for actresses.list. MOVIE_ID: a movie in which the characters appeared. PERSON_ID: useful to easily retrieve the person name playing this character in this movie. TXT: not sure if it's needed, to store notes and so on. - characters.key: map character name to CHARACTER_IDs, needed by the imdb_access.search_character() method. No support for "alternate names" or "biographies" of characters, since these information are not in the database. _Every_ character _ever_ played will have its characterID and entry in any of the above files; I'm not sure how big they will be. And the support to get the "real" characterID from the IMDb site will be limited: many characters will not have their characterID on the web pages, while others may be listed under an alternate name. [sql] Similar to 'local': we need to parse actors.list and actresses.list at insert time, and add a "character" table. The personRole column of the castInfo table can become a foreign key pointing to the character, but it may also remain a string (retrieving the characterID at access-time). Another table, character_info, will be required to map a character to the movies in which it was present and the personID of the actor/actress. I've for sure missed something; it looks like a big task, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. What do you think about it? Any volunteers? :-) I'll start now, writing a script to count how many single characters appear in actors.list and actresses.list files - this is probably an important information (and I'll know if these info can be extraced easily/quickly enough). -- Davide Alberani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [PGP KeyID: 0x465BFD47] http://erlug.linux.it/~da/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Imdbpy-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/imdbpy-devel
