CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonrestgoogle-api
Albert H
Albert H

Reputation: 1051

Invalid userId argument in REST people.get() using Google People APIs

According to Google's OAUTH API documentation, the userinfo.profile and userinfo.email scopes have been deprecated in favor of using profile and email. There is a lot of information from other API users about this switch as well.

However, when trying to use the People API, I get this error:

2016-02-22 13:01:25,044 :Exception on /admin/testbank/settings [GET]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  (Flask traceback omitted...)
  File "/home/somedev/testweb/views/admin_view.py", line 78, in admin_view
    res_acct_info = people_service.people().get(userId='me').execute()
  File "/home/somedev/env/lib/python3.4/site-packages/googleapiclient/discovery.py", line 676, in method
    raise TypeError('Got an unexpected keyword argument "%s"' % name)
TypeError: Got an unexpected keyword argument "userId"

Looking at the Google API sample, this should be the right call. However, dumping parameters.argmap within the library's discovery.py shows that userId does not exist. What am I doing wrong?

(Note: I'm trying to tag google-people, since this is where the API pages suggest, but I don't have enough rep to tag this. Could someone else add this tag for me?)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 493

Answers (1)

Albert H
Albert H

Reputation: 1051

It turns out that I've been blind to the exact code I'm reading... all of these examples (particularly Google's example) have been using the Google+ API, which does indeed have the userId argument.

For reference, the "old way" is by using the oauth2/userinfo service:

service = build('oauth2', 'v2', http=http)
user = users_service.userinfo().get().execute()
name = user.get('name')
email = user.get('email')

You can use the Google+ API to get the same information - it will work, even if the user does not have a Google+:

service = discovery.build("plus", "v1", http=http)
user = service.people().get(userId='me').execute()
# This assumes that user['emailAddresses'] exists and
# has at least one element...
name = user.get('displayName')
email = user.get('emailAddresses')[0].get("value")

At the time of writing, it seems that the People API was released recently (February 10th, 2016)! It makes sense that there wouldn't be much documentation about it...

To use the newer People API (and maybe claim cleanliness from Google+), this is the correct way to fetch the current user's information:

service = discovery.build('people', 'v1', http_auth)
user = people_service.people().get(resourceName='people/me').execute()
# This assumes that user['names'] and user['emailAddresses']
# exists and has at least one element...
name = user.get('names')[0].get("displayName")
email = user.get('emailAddresses')[0].get("value")

resourceName replaces userId in the People API. It has a similar purpose (to identify the current user or another user), but has a different format, as seen with using 'people/me' versus just 'me'.

Both the Google+ and the newer People API simply require the email and profile scopes. However, unlike the former userinfo API, you need to manually enable the Google+ API and/or the People API in order to use them.

tl;dr: Google+ API uses userId='me', new People API uses resourceName='people/me', you should use one of these supported APIs - both return the same information, just in a slightly different format!

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions