IPlayableItem

When working with playlists or the current playing context, you will encounter the IPlayableItem type, which only contains a Type property. Spotify recently introduced shows/episodes to the API, and thus had to adapt API endpoints which previously just returned track objects. Now, playlists and the current playing context can include two types: tracks and episodes. To reflect this in our models, we introduced IPlayableItem.

var spotify = new SpotifyClient("YourAccessToken");

var playlist = await spotify.Playlists.Get("37i9dQZEVXbMDoHDwVN2tF");
foreach (PlaylistTrack<IPlayableItem> item in playlist.Tracks.Items)
{
  // When was it added
  Console.WriteLine(item.AddedAt);
  // The only propety on item is item.Type, it's a IPlayableItem
  Console.WriteLine(item.Track.Type);
}

Now, this type per se is probably useless to you. You're interested in the name, uri or artist of the episode/track. To get that info, you have to type cast the IPlayableItem to the respective type:

foreach (PlaylistTrack<IPlayableItem> item in playlist.Tracks.Items)
{
  if (item.Track is FullTrack track)
  {
    // All FullTrack properties are available
    Console.WriteLine(track.Name);
  }
  if (item.Track is FullEpisode episode)
  {
    // All FullTrack properties are available
    Console.WriteLine(episode.Name);
  }
}

To this day, IPlayableItem can only be FullTrack or FullEpisode.

Fields

When requesting just a subset of fields using the fields query parameter, the call might fail with an exception similar to Received unknown playlist element type. For example, the following call fails:

var playlistGetItemsRequest = new PlaylistGetItemsRequest();
playlistGetItemsRequest.Fields.Add("items(track(name))");
var playlistItems = await spotify.Playlists.GetItems("YourPlaylistId", playlistGetItemsRequest);

By requesting just the track name from the items, we don't have any kind of type information of the item itself. Thus, we're unable to cast it to the correct model. To fix this, include the type in the fields as well:

playlistGetItemsRequest.Fields.Add("items(track(name,type))");

If you're paginating a request with a subset of fields and you don't include the field next, we assume there is only one page and your results will be limited. To fix this, you must include next as one of the fields:

playlistGetItemsRequest.Fields.Add("next, items(track(name,type))");