This page is a draft
Please add comments as appropriate.
Introduction
Every caDSR Tool provides one or more service for updating, reporting and otherwise managing the caDSR database and its content. This page details the metadata which describes a caDSR Tool and these services. By definition a Tool is distinct from an API in that the tool provides a User Interface to control software logic. The tools may or may not incorporate infrastructure software available as separate interfaces independent of the human interface. The UI may be provided via an internet browser such as IE or Firefox, a Swing application or other technology.
As the metadata is refined a formal UML model will be created and annotated.
The word "service" as used on this page refers to a category of general capability and does not refer to the caGRID, Web Service or other specific implementation of a tool capability.
Persistence
The metadata is persisted within the caDSR database itself thus hosting the metadata description and data instance simultaneously.
Metadata
- Id
The tool id, unique and immutable.
- Long Name
The published name used for readability.
- Short Name
An abbreviation or ancronym for quick reference, e.g. Sentinel is the short name for the caDSR Sentinel Tool.
- URL
The URL to invoke the entry for the tool. This must be complete, include the http or https prefix, include the server and web application reference and terminate with a slash, e.g. https://cdecurate.nci.nih.gov/cdecurate/ is correct, https://cdecurate.nci.nih.gov is not correct.
- Version
The tool version number.
Heart Beat Action
The action to be suffixed to the URL (see above) which is used exclusively for testing the availability and responsiveness of the software, e.g do/heartbeat and heartbeat.do. The HTTP response is simply a successful status code 200 (see HTTP Status Codes. All other codes are considered a failure and will result in alerts to Systems Administrators. The recommended response message is:<html><body><p>Available</p></body></html>
- Interrogation Action
The action to be suffixed to the URL (see above) which is used to retrieve registration information, e.g. do/interrogate and interrogate.do. Each caDSR Tool is self describing and must respond with well formed XML containing all the metadata described above. more thought...
- Services
The list of services provided by the tool, must be one or more of the following:- Search
Provides a means to search all or part of the caDSR. - Edit
Provides a means to edit the caDSR content. - Admin
Provides a means to administer the caDSR database, list-of-value tables, etc. - Report
Provides a means to display detailed caDSR content. - Export
Provides a means to extract caDSR content in some well formed binary form suitable for use by other software. - Import
Provides a means to import content using a well formed binary message.
- Search
