The field 'Commons' not defined in freebase provider for fsharp

Question

I'm having some problems with the freebase api. I have managed to put a key to the freebase provider so I don't see any 403 errors, relating quota restrictions. But since I used a google api key, commons is not being recognized when I hit "alt + enter". But while I'm writing, the provider manages to show me data.

[<Literal>]
let FreebaseApiKey = "AIzaSyCOn15-T31Ls"
type FreebaseDataWithKey = FreebaseDataProvider<Key=FreebaseApiKey>
let dataWithKey = FreebaseDataWithKey.GetDataContext()
let travelDestinations = dataWithKey.Commons.Travel.``Travel destinations``
let all = travelDestinations |> Seq.toList
let first = all.Head.Name

As you can see, I have access to Travel Destinations, so the provider shows me data correctly but when I execute it:

Script.fsx(17,38): error FS0039: The field, constructor or member 'Commons' is not defined

The weird thing is that if I delete the google key, and use the provider, this error does not happen. Any clues?

Answer 1

In a provider like freebase, we need to do things asynchronously, and that unfortunately causes the error reporting not to be very good (see https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/issues/280) What's probably happening is that freebase is returning errors due to the api key not being right or something similar, and does errors are not surfacing, as the toplevel objects are already cached. You can either look under Fiddler to see the json being returned, use data.DataContext.SendingQuery or data.DataContext.SendingRequest, or clean the cache by deleting the FreebaseSchema and FreebaseRuntime folders under your temporary internet files system folder.

We recently tried to change this to cause errors to surface by generating the toplevel types synchronously, but that caused other problems (https://github.com/fsharp/FSharp.Data/issues/522)