Bases

Let's say you want to use ro.py to fetch the username history of a user, and you already know their user ID. You could do this:

user = await client.get_user(968108160)
async for username in user.username_history():
    print(username)

This code works, but it has an issue: we're sending an unnecessary request to Roblox.

To explain why, let's take a look at what ro.py is doing behind the scenes in this code. - First, we call await client.get_user(2067807455). ro.py asks Roblox for information about the user with the ID 2067807455 and returns it as a User object.
- Next, we iterate through user.username_history. ro.py asks Roblox for the username history for user 2067807455 and returns it to you.

In this code, we call await client.get_user(), but we don't use any user information, like user.name or user.description. We don't need to make this request!

ro.py lets you skip the "information request" with the client.get_base_TYPE methods. We can use the client.get_base_user() function to improve this code:

user = client.get_base_user(2067807455)  # no await!
async for username in user.username_history():
    print(username)

Hint

In ro.py, all functions you await or paginators you iterate through with async for make at least one request internally. Notice how you need to await the get_user function, but not the get_base_user function!

This works for other Roblox types as well, like groups and assets. For example, this code kicks a user from a group with only 1 request:

group = client.get_base_group(9695397)
user = client.get_base_user(2067807455)
await group.kick_user(user)

There's another technique we can use to optimize this example further. For functions that accept only one type, like kick_user which always accepts a user, ro.py accepts bare IDs:

group = client.get_base_group(9695397)
await group.kick_user(2067807455)