The Movie Database Support
Support → General
IDs consistency
posted by steph-lionSTAFFMOD on January 9, 2023 at 2:56 PM
Hi. I'm developing a commercial application (for free, no payments or whatever). Once the application will be in production mode, I need to be sure that your IDs don't change over the time. For example: let's say one of my users (id: 1) saves one of the movies (id: 298), so I could have a record on my database like (1 - 298) gathered from your IDs (like genres, actors etc..). Can I go with no problems with that "298" or IDs change over the time on your database (or whatever data structure you use)? Because I'm using your IDs to save stuff in my database, and if they change, that will be a problem for users.
Reply by Travis Bell
on January 9, 2023 at 3:50 PM
ID's themselves do not change, no, BUT duplicates do get created. While it is site policy to always keep the lowest (original) ID, that is not 100% always going to be the case. Very rarely, but from time to time, a moderator might accidentally keep the higher ID. When this happens, the ID would essentially swap. It's a completely different asset, so they don't really swap, but that's how it would appear.
Other than that one edge case, you can count on ID's as being permanent.