Question

I’m trying to build a simple reviews site for a very specific search parameter, which I can pull information back from Google Places API. I understand I cannot store any information other than what Google says I can, and it sounds like I can only store the “reference” parameter and the “id” parameter.

Upon creation of a review for a place returned from Google, I need to store some identifier so that when someone else searches Google Places through my site, I can do an AJAX call to my DB and pull all reviews for that Place.

Ultimately, my question is, which key should I store? Or both?

Answer 1

As per the documentation:

id contains a unique stable identifier denoting this place. This
identifier may not be used to retrieve information about this place,
but is guaranteed to be valid across sessions. It can be used to
consolidate data about this Place, and to verify the identity of a
Place across separate searches.

reference contains a unique token that you can use to retrieve
additional information about this place in a Place Details request.
You can store this token and use it at any time in future to refresh
cached data about this Place, but the same token is not guaranteed to
be returned for any given Place across different searches.

It would make sense to store both, reference to retrieve reviews from Google Places and id to group your place reviews in your db.