Openscihub API

This package defines the openscihub API via isomorphic javascript modules (and their corresponding READMEs). These modules are used on the production openscihub servers to validate API requests (yep, openscihub uses Node.js).

Installation

npm install osh-api

Actions

Here is the list of all openscihub API actions. Get to it!

• POST /join
• POST /join-with-orcid
• GET /invitations/<token>
• POST /invitations/<token>/link-to-orcid

Responses

Because the Openscihub API uses the OAuth2 framework, its HTTP responses are modeled after those defined in the standard. See, for example, the token endpoint responses.

A response is always a JSON object. On success, the object will contain the requested payload, the format of which will vary depending on the requested resource.

An error response object will always contain the following properties:

• error string: The error code.
• error_description string: A short message about the error, usually a sentence or two.
• error_uri string: Not used.

Other properties may exist depending on the resource. These will be documented.

Successful responses will return the requested payload in a JSON object, whereas error responses will return a JSON object with the following properties

will be modeled after those defined in the OAuth2 standard (for example, inspect the access token endpoint error response format.

Responses to HTTP API requests and their Javascript API counterparts (and many other js helper methods defined on the endpoint interface functions) take the following form:

{
  "code": {integer},
  "message": {string},
  "result": {object}
}

where the integer code is 0 on success, and positive otherwise. Such payloads are returned from HTTP requests as a JSON response body and from javascript methods as a POJO (plain old javascript object).

As a result, javascript API callbacks should take the form:

function(response) {
  if (response.code) {
    // error handling...
  }
  else {
    // success handling...
  }
}

Rather than the usual Node.js style:

function(err, result) {
  if (err) {
    // error handling...
  }
  else {
    // success handling...
  }
}

Testing

The openscihub javascript API comes with a testing suite for a running API server. It requires the server host and that the server has been seeded with a single user with username test and password test. It is run with the command:

node test/test.js --host="localhost:8080"

or from within a script:

var oshApi = require('osh-api');

oshApi.test({host: 'localhost:8080'}, function(err) {
  // ...
});

Javascript interfaces

Each API action has a JS interface consisting of an action-function (that performs the API action using superagent) and a set of properties and helper methods (exposed as properties on the function) that support the action-function.

The helper properties and functions fall loosely into 3 categories.

• validation
• access permission
• response definition

Validation

Exposed validation functions are always synchronous and return an API response if the check fails, or undefined if it succeeds. These are quick checks that prevent obviously invalid requests from incurring a communication latency.

Some validation steps are necessarily asynchronous/time-consuming (like checking for the existence of a record in a database). It doesn't make sense to perform these checks in a client, since they will run anyway on the API server.

However, the responses that may be generated from async checks are still recorded in the action-function responses object. Furthermore, these responses are exposed on the action-function for use by the server implementing this API.

URI parameters

URI parameter validation failures always result in a generic NotFound response (no details are given as to the offending parameter). This behavior mirrors the server's response when it cannot match a URI to a route.

Responses

Every action-function has a responses property. This is an array-like object that maps integer response codes to their corresponding (default) response properties; default properties usually consist of only the response message.

For example, every single action-function has the following responses registered:

responses[0] = {message: 'Success.'};
responses[1] = {message: 'Connection error.'};
responses[2] = {message: 'Malformed URI.'};

License

MIT