fxn get_inat_obs with invalid name produces error

[vijaybarve]

> get_inat_obs(taxon_name ="abcxyz", geo = TRUE, quality = "research", maxresults = 10000000)
Error in get_inat_obs(taxon_name = "abcxyz", geo = TRUE, quality = "research",  : 
  Your search returned too many results, please consider breaking it up into smaller chunks by year or month

[LDalby]

What version of the package are you running?

Stepping through the code I can see your search gives 13407895 results. So I think the error message is actually OK.
Your maxresults value would throw an error in the dev version of the package. Currently you need to break up your search so you get less than 10000 results per call.

[vijaybarve]

In this case the name is invalid. taxon_name = "abcxyz" And the return value of 13407895 is all research grade records. So trying to figure out how to handle that.

[vijaybarve]

@kueda is this expected behavior of the API?

[stragu]

Thanks, @vijaybarve . This is indeed a limitation of the old API. Moving to the new API will fix that, as it returns 0 results as expected, rather than every single observation in the database.

See for example this API request: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations?q=abcxyz&order=desc&order_by=created_at