MBS-8757 brought up a mismatch between the actual and reasonably-expected behaviour of by-area browses.

As it stands, browsing for all events associated with the "Los Angeles" area only brings up those events directly linked to LA, but not to any venues in LA, nor subdivisions of LA (e.g. Hollywood). While this is sensible from a database perspective, it does not match real-world expectations.

A similar issue exists for Places; if "Foo Studios" has "Foo Studio A" and "Foo Studio B" set up as children, it would make sense to be able to find entities related to either of the three without having to issue several requests.

Now, what form this would take is an open question. I would suggest additional inc= flags; either entity-specific (e.g. "rels-via-area-parts", "rels-via-area-places" and "rels-via-place-parts"), or generic (e.g. "rels-via-sub-entities"). The latter would also be usable to allow by-artist browses, where the artist is a group, to also look for entities linked to members of that group.

Of course, DB-query-wise, this all gets quite tricky. Allowing by-area browses to imply by-place for all places directly linked to that area is probably easy one extra join?). But given the number of possible subdivisions, looking through all those would be harder (and if you then need to include all places in all those sub-areas, and all parts of those places, it gets harder still).

Maybe it's more something for search requests instead?