Are there any plans to enhance the define_extract APIs? I work with the USA full-count samples (shout out to usa1850c!) and typically add a case selection to limit the output to a county or city. It appears that I’ll need to download data for the entire US. I can certainly work with that and create a subset within R, but I’m unnecessarily using more of your storage and bandwidth capacity than I need to.
Hi Phil, thanks for the feedback. Our eventual goal with our APIs is to have them be feature-complete / feature-equivalent to the web functionality. Having said that, it’ll take us a while to get there and we don’t currently have a specific timeline for case selection functionality via API. Part of the hope of the beta is to uncover user use cases to help direct our next steps, so this is useful feedback for us. For now we’re certainly ok with you using up a little more bandwidth and processing power than strictly necessary. 
Hello Fran,
I have been enjoying IPUMS API so much! However, I was wondering if it’s possible to attach characteristics to parents through API like we are able to on the web interface, or if this function is still under development. Thank you.
Hi Yuko! I am glad you are finding the API to be useful!
Attached characteristics is not yet a supported feature in the API, but it is definitely in the plans, although I cannot offer a timeline for you yet except to say it is not on the roadmap for the remainder of 2022. You can see the current status of supported and unsupported features here: The IPUMS USA API | IPUMS Developer Portal
second Phil’s request here for filter/subsetting – I am making an extract that amounts to about 2% ACS sample, definitely don’t need all those 800Mb.
Good news, case selection was added to the APIs last year. If you are an ipumspy or ipumsr user, they have code samples in their documentation (follow the links here) which show how to use it.
If you are using the API directly without the assistance of one of the client libraries I mentioned, you can consult the reference documentation at developer.ipums.org. The documentation around case selection could use a bit of attention, so if it’s not clear after looking there write back and we’ll give you a hand!
good to know! I have an old version of ipumsr that stays consistent with R 4.2.1 that I have to use, so I would have missed that in the documentation.