Clarification of some of the inc= parameters for lookups

MusicBrainz Development
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Hello! I just had three quick questions about the API documentation:

  1. Several entities allow you to use inc=artists, and some entities (the same entities?) allow you to use inc=artist-credits. A cursory comparison makes it seem as though there is no difference between the response when either (or both) are defined. Are they interchangeable, or did I perhaps miss something?
  2. In the introduction to subqueries, url-rels is listed among subqueries available for the Recording entity. Is this somehow different from the url-rels referenced in the Relationships section further below, or is there special functionality for it with Relationships? It seems odd to me that it would be referenced before the Relationships section, while none of the other *-rels relationships are.
  3. Is there perhaps some other way for me to reference what subqueries are available for each entity? I tried looking at the RelaxNG file as well as the documentation referenced above, and it doesn’t feel particularly straightforward for me to follow (granted, it’s not straightforward considering using some subqueries like inc=releases then allows you to use the media subquery as well, but I wasn’t sure if there was other documentation I could follow)

Appreciate the help, MusicBrainz is a sweet service :heart:

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  1. There used to be subtle and confusing differences between inc=artists and inc=artist-credits, but now the former is just an alias for the latter. There shouldn’t be any differences between them now.

  2. That looks like a mistake.

  3. That’s the only documentation we have, outside of reading the code. But in general I’d avoid subqueries because of this restriction: “Note that the number of linked entities returned is always limited to 25. If you need the remaining results, you will have to perform a browse request.” If there’s something that appears to be possible using subqueries and not browse queries, let me know and I’ll look into it.

I’ll update the docs to remove any reference to inc=artists and fix the url-rels mistake.

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That’s fantastic, thank you so much!