What is the best way to determine if an entity exists?

Pipeline Integrations
1

I have the entity ID, but I need to check to make sure the entity record actually exists. I know I can just query the entity in some fashion similar to this:

SG_conn.find(‘Sequence’, filter, entity_fields)

with my entity fields being something like:

[‘id’, ‘is’, seq_id]

and check what it returns, but that assumes I know the entity type, and I was hoping for something more universal and wondered if there was a cleaner way to do it.

2

You’ll always need to know the entity-type as well as the id to find the entity.

1 Like
3

Thanks!
I knew the ID was required, I just didn’t know of there was a “does exist” method somewhere that I didn’t know about.
So, just do a “find_one” and check to see if the return is empty?

4

You can read all active entity types via:

https://developer.shotgridsoftware.com/python-api/reference.html?highlight=schema#shotgun_api3.shotgun.Shotgun.schema_entity_read

5

Right, but you appeared to be asking if it was possible without the entity-type, which isn’t possible.

“but that assumes I know the entity type”

The best approach is as you say, do a find_one and check if it returns empty.

Note: If you’re wanting to check a number of id’s in one batch, you’ll need to use find() and then check for an empty list instead.