Since Aron's tip of the other week on the proper URL for creating objects
via REST, I've been trying to replicate the example curl script's success
with a short python program. However, I'm running into some snags, and
wondered if anyone had any pointers.

You can see my sample program at https://gist.github.com/884070
When I run this, I get a 400 error. jboss/server/cspace/log/server.log
says:

ERROR [org.jboss.resteasy.core.SynchronousDispatcher] Failed executing POST
collectionobjects
org.jboss.resteasy.spi.BadRequestException: content-type was null and
expecting to extract a body
at
org.jboss.resteasy.core.MessageBodyParameterInjector.inject(MessageBodyParameterInjector.java:131)

script, it does seem that curl includes the content-type header in the first
packet it sends, while the python script doesn't include it until the second
packet. I tried working around this by skipping the python mime libraries
and crafting the payload by hand, but that led to a series of MIME
validation errors from collectionspace, which made me think I was barking up
the wrong tree.

So, a few questions:

• are people using the REST API to create objects with a different
  toolchain? any public examples?

• might it be worth waiting for CS 1.5? According to the wiki, it won't be
  necessary to wrap create requests in MIME any more, which should make this
  quite a bit simpler.

• For that matter, how hard would it be to get a nightly build running now?
  I don't see anything on the wiki other than installing released versions.

cheers,
Joe

I would state that is has been a lot easier to integrate since the
change to POX so it is well worth using 1.5

The App layers primary reason for existence is to integrate with the
service layer and deal with the complexities necessary in sending data
to them. Unfortunately my experience dealing with the Service Layer APIs
is all thr Java but I feel your pain and I am happy to share that pain
at anytime. And you are welcome to look into the App code to see what it
does with payloads etc. And I have just got blob file upload saving thr
the API but that complexity was mostly java being a pain with
fileuploads and boundaries and content-dispositions.

how hard is it to get the trunk code working? not too hard if you
already have a working service layer. You should be able to check it out
over your existing build and cross fingers it might all just work, but
don't quote me on that. I just usually dev against the
nightly.collectionspace service layer - which is fine if you don't need
to see any of the service layer errors - so probably not useful for you.

Good luck

Chris

On 24/03/2011 15:34, Joe Slag wrote:

See my comments/responses inline below.

From: talk-bounces@lists.collectionspace.org [mailto:talk-bounces@lists.collectionspace.org] On Behalf Of Joe Slag
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 8:35 AM
To: talk@lists.collectionspace.org
Subject: [Talk] more REST object creation challenges

Since Aron's tip of the other week on the proper URL for creating objects via REST, I've been trying to replicate the example curl script's success with a short python program. However, I'm running into some snags, and wondered if anyone had any pointers.

You can see my sample program at  https://gist.github.com/884070 https://gist.github.com/884070

When I run this, I get a 400 error. jboss/server/cspace/log/server.log says:

ERROR [org.jboss.resteasy.core.SynchronousDispatcher] Failed executing POST collectionobjects

org.jboss.resteasy.spi.BadRequestException: content-type was null and expecting to extract a body

    at org.jboss.resteasy.core.MessageBodyParameterInjector.inject(MessageBodyParameterInjector.java:131)

So, a few questions:

• are people using the REST API to create objects with a different toolchain? any public examples?

Besides ‘curl’, all the clients I know of are different variations of Java clients.  There is a RESTEasy-based Java client that we use to test the services and to perform some forms of data import.  There is the App layer that uses standard Java libraries classes to talk with the services and there is another payload-centric Java tool we use to perform additional testing of the services.  All of this code is available at https:source.collectionspace.org/collection-space/.

• might it be worth waiting for CS 1.5? According to the wiki, it won't be necessary to wrap create requests in MIME any more, which should make this quite a bit simpler.

Yes, it might be worth using the v1.5 release instead.  Everything is just plain-old-XML so you may not encounter the problems you’re seeing in v1.3.

• For that matter, how hard would it be to get a nightly build running now? I don't see anything on the wiki other than installing released versions.

cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe,

Off the top of my head, these are the steps that would be involved in
updating to trunk:

mkdir svc ui app
cd svc
svn co
https://source.collectionspace.org/collection-space/src/services/trunk/
cd trunk
mvn clean install -DskipTests
ant deploy create_db import

cd ../app
svn co
https://source.collectionspace.org/collection-space/src/application/trunk/svcapp/
cd svcapp
mvn clean install -DskipTests

cd ../ui
svn co https://source.collectionspace.org/collection-space/src/ui/trunk/
cd trunk
mvn clean install -DskipTests

Starting both servers now, should give you a trunk version of cspace.

Note that the above will clear the database, etc. To avoid this you can
exclude "create_db import", but this is risky if services have made any
changes to the database structure. Also you might want to do the
initialization of dropdowns, and maybe initialization of the sample
data, described in the install instructions.

Be aware that things might be broken in trunk - we try to keep it stable
enough to be able to develop on it, but it does break/behave weird
occasionally!

Hope that helped,

~Kasper