Archive 1.x:Browse

The Browse web service endpoint has been deprecated since OSF Web Service version 1.0a8. It has been replaced by an updated version of the Search web service endpoint.

The Browse web service endpoint will appear in the OSF Web Service packages until the Beta version of OSF Web Service will be released. We will keep it into the package for backward compatibility purposes.

For developers: any developers that currently use the Browse endpoint within their product and services should start thinking to query the new Search endpoint instead.

The Browse Web service is used to get slices of data according to different criteria as indexed on a OSF Web Service instance. Each browse query can be applied to all, or a subset of, datasets accessible by the requester. Additionally, the requester can specify the types of things he wants to browse (example: browsing for all people) and the attributes used to describe these things (example: browsing all the people described using the birthday attribute (so; browsing all the people which have a birthday date recorded in the dataset)).

Developers communicate with the Browse Web service using the HTTP POST method. You may request one of the following mime types: (1) text/xml, (2) application/rdf+xml, (3) application/rdf+n3 or (4) application/json. The content returned by the Web service is serialized using the mime type requested and the data returned depends on the parameters selected.

Usage
This Web service is intended to be used by content management systems, developers or administrators to manage access to WSF (Web Service Framework) resources (users, datasets, Web services endpoints).

Web Service Endpoint Information
This section describes all you permissions you need in the WSF (Web Service Framework) to send a query to this Web service endpoint, and it describes how to access it.

To access this Web service endpoint you need the proper CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) permissions on a specific graph (dataset) of the WSF. Without the proper permissions on this graph you won't be able to send any queries to the endpoint.

Needed registered CRUD permission:


 * Create: False
 * Read: True
 * Update: False
 * Delete: False

As shown on the graph URI:


 * URIs of the datasets to be queried

Here is the information needed to communicate with this Web service's endpoint. Descriptions of the parameters are included below.

Note: if a parameter has a default value, the requester can omit it and the default value will be used. Also, some baseline Web services may not offer other values than the default.

HTTP method:


 * POST

Possible "Accept:" HTTP header field value:


 * text/xml (DTD validating the returned content)
 * application/json
 * application/rdf+xml
 * application/rdf+n3

URI:


 * http://[...]/ws/browse/ ?attributes=param1&types=param2&datasets=param3&items=param4&page=param5&inference=param6&include_aggregates=param7&registered_ip=param8

URI dynamic parameters description:

Note: All parameters have to be URL-encoded


 * param1 (default: all). List of filtering attributes (property) URIs separated by ";".
 * param2 (default: all). List of types of the things to be searched. Each type is separated by the ";" character. an example of such a list is: "type-a;type-b;type-c" meaning: I want to search for all the records with these types.
 * param3 (default: all). List of dataset URIs to be searched. Each dataset URI is separated by the ";".
 * param4. (default: 10)). The number of items to return in a single resultset
 * param5. (default: 0). The offset of the resultset to return. By example, to get the item 90 to 100, this parameter should be set to 9.
 * param6. (default: on).One of:
 * "on": Inference is enabled
 * "off": Inference is disabled


 * param7.(default: off) One of:
 * "true": Aggregation data included in the resultset
 * "false": Aggregation data not included in the resultset


 * param8.Target IP address registered in the WSF.

Example of Returned XML Document
This is an example of the XML document returned by this Web service endpoint for a given URI. This example returns a list of datasets accessible by a given user IP.

Query:

items=10&page=0&inference=on&include_aggregates=true&registered_ip=self%3A%3A1
 * http://[...]/ws/browse/parameters: attributes=all&types=all&datasets=http%3A%2F%2F[...]%2Fwsf%2Fdatasets%2F283%2F%3Bhttp%3A%2F%2F[...]%2Fwsf%2Fdatasets%2F160%2F&

"Accept:" HTTP header field value:


 * text/xml

Result:

HTTP Status Codes
Here are the possible HTTP status (error) codes returned by this Web service endpoint.

On error code and the specific error, a different message description can be issued (meaning a different error has been returned).


 * Code:200
 * Message:OK


 * Code:400
 * Message:Bad Request
 * Message description:The number of items returned per request has to be greater than 0 and lesser than 128
 * Message description:No dataset accessible by that user
 * Message description:No requester IP available
 * Message description: No Web service URI available
 * Message description:Target Web service XYZ not registered to this Web Services Framework
 * Message description:No access defined for this requester IP XYZ, dataset (XYZ) and Web service (XYZ)
 * Message description:The target Web service (XYZ) needs create access and the requested user (XYZ) doesn't have this access for that dataset (XYZ)
 * Message description:The target Web service (XYZ) needs read access and the requested user (XYZ) doesn't have this access for that dataset (XYZ)
 * Message description:The target Web service (XYZ) needs update access and the requested user (XYZ) doesn't have this access for that dataset (XYZ)
 * Message description:The target Web service (XYZ) needs delete access and the requested user (XYZ) doesn't have this access for that dataset (XYZ)


 * Code:406
 * Message:Not Acceptable
 * Message description:Unacceptable mime type requested


 * Code:500
 * Message:Internal Error