Difference between revisions of "DAS/2.1/Spec/Writeback"

Revision as of 16:27, 11 December 2008

DAS/2.1 Writeback Specification

DAS/2.1 Writeback Specification

DAS 2.1 annotation servers may support the creation, editing, and deletion of DAS resources as requested from DAS clients. This is also referred to as DAS writeback. A DAS2 resource is any entity represented in DAS2 XML that has a URI, and thus a "uri" attribute. The writeback URI is specified in the versioned source record of a DAS sources document using a CAPABILITY element of type "writeback", for example:

<CAPABILITY type="writeback" query_uri="http://www.biodas.org/das2/h_sapiens/v35/writeback" />

At most one writeback CAPABILITY element is allowed per versioned source (???).

The client sends an HTTP POST to the URI of the writeback capability, which is found by resolving the capability's query_uri to a URI. The content of the writeback POST is XML specifying what DAS resources are being created/edited/deleted. Writeback uses the same XML schemas as returned for DAS2 features, types, and segments as specifiied in the DAS2 retrieval specs, except for two additions described below. The servers response to a successful writeback is a modified version of the POSTed content. Use of formats other than XML for representing the DAS resources is currently not supported.

[For creation/editing/deletion of DAS2 sources and versioned sources there also needs to be a pointer somewhere to the writeback URI for a server's sources doc].

Writeback Request

For DAS 2.1 sources, segments, types, and features, the content-type of the XML returned is the same as in DAS 2.1 retrieval:

   sources --> application/x-das-sources+xml
   segments --> application/x-das-segments+xml
   types --> application/x-das-types+xml
   features --> application/x-das-features+xml

To include a comment use the <PROP> element of the root DAS2 element

New Resource URIs

A special syntax is needed to guarantee that a new request for DAS2 resource creation won't be mistaken for editing of a previous resource due to a client accidentally using the same URI as an existing feature for the new feature creation request (this is a problem only in the POST, afterward not an issue since server is in charge of permanent URI assignment). These client-assigned URIs have the syntax "das-private:" followed by an alphanumeric string of at least 1 and no more than 20 characters. The legal characters are 0-9, A-Z and a-z. Some examples are: "das-private:0", "das-private:AAAA" and "das-private:ThisIsPrivate007".

Writeback Response

The server is free to make the requested modifications, as well as other modifications as it sees fit. The server responds to a request by sending back an XML representation of the modifications. In the simple case where the server makes no modifications of its own, this is just the client's POST XML content mirrored back.

In addition to a required "uri" attribute, each DAS2 resource has an optional "old_uri" attribute reserved for use in writeback. A server may change the resouce's URI during writeback. If this happens then in the server's response the "old_uri" attibute contains the URI reference sent to the server and the normal "uri" attribute contains the new URI reference determined by the server.

For every DELETE completed, the server should mirror the DELETE back. However a server _may_ choose not to actually do a delete -- for example servers that maintain a complete versioning history. If this is the case then the XML element for the entity that wasn't deleted should be returned as if it was an edit request, so a server can modify the entity if it chooses to (for example, changing the URI to indicate a "deleted" entity without actual removal from the server?)

Transactional Integrity

A DAS2 writeback server should support transactional integrity (actions should be atomic, isolated, and recoverable -- see for example here for more details). Each HTTP POST should be considered a unit of transactional integrity. So for example if there are multiple edited features in the POST content, the server should make the modifications necessary to edit all of the features and return an HTTP OK status, or else edit none of them and return an HTTP error status.

Error Handling

Concurrent Modifications

If a problem, use locking. Otherwise relies on database -- it's up to database whether a curation can be "branched" -- should be easy to do if database uses unique URIs for each version of a curation. Then branching is just annotation A being edited once to yield annotation B1 and a second time to yield B2 -- both are valid. If a database doesn't want to support this, it's easy enough to throw an error (resource no longer available?) if someone attempts to edit A after B1 has already been created.

Handling Feature "Splits"

Splitting feature A into B and C

  <DELETE uri="A" />

  <FEATURE uri="B" ...

  <FEATURE uri="C" ...

Handling Feature "Merges"

Merging B and C into A

  <DELETE uri="B" /> 

  <DELETE uri="C" /> 

  <FEATURE uri="A" ...