Place Categories in v1.2

[Mobijack]

Hi,

With the upcoming changes to Place Categories, will it impact the structure of responses in the API?

Thanks,

Jonathan

@mobijack

[Ben Dodson]

The categories API will change to support sub-categories but it shouldn't be a breaking change (the response will be the same as now but there will be less categories and there will be a new 'subcategories' property with a further array of categories on each category).

Ben

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[Mobijack]

Hi Ben,

Glad to hear it shouldn't be a breaking change.

So in principle, if we don't make any changes our 3rd party applications, that currently use category information, will provide the reduced set of over-arching categories.  We'll need to make changes to our code if we wish to expose the additional sub-category information.  Both the category (place_category_id) and sub-category (presumably something like place_subcategory_id) will come back on any API call requesting place information.

I know you can't make a blanket guarantee, as you don't know how each developer has written their specific code, so there is an obvious assumption that we haven't used any techniques to hard code or cache category information.

Thanks,

Jonathan

@mobijack 

[Ben Dodson]

You'll need to make changes to support the subcategories and the existing place categories will be incorrect for places (i.e. if you look at a place, the category id will have changed and will be one of the new subcategories). We will be making the subcategory database available in advance so that developers can update their apps.