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API design

Principles of the API design:

  1. All documented routes should be appended to https://blisk.ijs.si/api/.
  2. All the routes are available as POST calls, even if they do not result in changes in the database, because:
    • some routes will have non-trivial input parameters (structured data, arbitrary strings), which are difficult and clunky to encode as path parameters, and expecting request body parameters in GET calls can be problematic and misleading
    • we can have short clear URLS for all routes, and there are limits on URL length in some contexts.
  3. Some routes also have a GET counterpart, which behave the same way as the POST call but do not allow for response body parameters (default values are used instead).
  4. All request parameters are provided as JSON request body parameters, except for the object's id, which is used to identify a given object and provided as an obligatory path parameter for certain types of calls (e.g., retrieve).
  5. Each route falls under a particular type of operation identified with a particular verb as the first part of the route. The verbs include:
    • retrieve: return data for a given object
    • search: return all the objects which match the set of search parameters
    • create: create a new object based on the parameters provided, unless a matching object already exists and only one is allowed (we almost called this "get_or_create" instead)
    • update: update the properties of a given object based on the parameters provided
    • delete: delete a given object
    • attach: attach the given object to a particular resource, if not yet attached
    • detach: detach the given object from a particular resource, if attached
    • process: process the input data with an appropriate independent tool (e.g., the CLASSLA NLP library)
  6. If the operation verb has a "-batch" suffix, it differs from its non-batch counterpart as follows:
    • users can make 1 API call instead of N API calls for N items
    • the input data should be a list, with each element in the format expected by the non-batch route
    • the output data is a list, with each element corresponding to the element at the same position in the input, where each element has three fields:
      • status: the status of the operation (e.g., "ok", "warning", "error")
      • message: a message describing the results of the operation (e.g., whether an object was found or created, or the cause of the warning or error)
      • data: the output data (for successful calls), in the same format as non-batch output
  7. Routes which do not change data in the database (retrieve, search, process) are publicly available. Routes which may result in changes in the database (create, update, delete, attach, detach) require authentication credentials.
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