Design Specs: API

API Specs

• Objects stop here -- what is passed to displays will be strings and numbers
• Define data building blocks for common display formats -- lists, tables, build off these blocks
• Provide consistent data access methods to above for display
• Define common data packs? -- e.g. id and common names?
• Analyze user reported data issues and build more robustness for common problems (e.g. object not found can't call method)

Notes 2010.02.04

• The API need not be aware of presentation details. It doesn't need to know about tables, for example, although it should handle generic one and two dimensional arrays.
• We may want to consider passing some objects through to templates. If we pass WormBase::API objects, templates can then do additional on-the-fly data extraction.
• We probably DON'T want to pass Ace objects. This means that your data munging subroutines will need to do something like:

 $allele = $gene->Allele;
 $returned_data => { data => "$allele" };

This will stringify the name of the object and prevent it from being passed as an object.

Resources

You can find the API in the WormBase mercurial repository:

lib/WormBase/API

There are tests in t/

cd WormBase // the directory where you've checked out your code
prove -l t/API/Object/Gene.t

These are obviously dependent on being able to connect to the database...

Issues Table

Issue	Pros	Cons
Let ACE objects through	minimal API programming	breaking the CVM barriers
Allow API objects trough	maintain CVM barriers, flexibility for views	more complex than letting ACE objects through
Create "query language"	provides mechanisms to do complex queries involving data from tagged objects	complexity, question of robustness