I have a REST service that allows people to put in a course title as part of the query to get scores, but, sometimes they may want to get a group, such as Calculus% for Calc 1, 2 and 3.
But, what is the best way to give them an option that makes sense?
For example, I have http://localhost/myrest/any/any/Calculus III
where the first two parameters are student id and some grade category.
I don't think having http://localhost/myrest/any/any/contains/Calculus III is a good use as then I will need to force them to use equals if that is what they are looking for.
Another option is http://localhost/myrest/any/any/Calculus% or http://localhost/myrest/any/any/%Calc% is another option, but then you have removed the option to easily use % as an allowed character.
So, to give additional filtering options in a REST URL, what is the best (defined as simplest/most intuitive for the user) way to allow contains or starts with.
In your system, would the following query list all subjects in the grade category?
http://localhost/myrest/any/any/
If yes, then one option you can consider is extracting the non-exact subject name into a GET parameter. Thus without breaking the current logic where having a full name of the subject in the URL provides the score for that subject, you'd also have the ability to filter the list of subjects within the same grade category by means of the GET parameter.
For example:
http://localhost/myrest/any/any/?search=Calculus*
... could provide a result like this:
<subjects>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20I">A</subject>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20II">B</subject>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20III">C</subject>
</subjects>
Related
I've got a list of author names but I don't have Id's for any of them.
I'd like to:
Query by author name and store the most probable AuId.
List all papers written by a given AuId.
Is there any way to do this with the current interpret/evaluate APIs? It seems like everything is tied to a paper entity and I want to be sure I am only ever selecting and using one AuId.
Thanks.
I am not aware of such a feature. But indirectly, you could first search for the author name (AA.AuN in the expr-field), obtain all the (unique) various author IDs (AA.AuId in the attributes field), and search for their publications.
(You could even add orderby=logprob:desc, but to be honest, I am not 100% sure what logprob does.)
So, the first step could be to search for the author name (e.g. John Smith) like this and fetch all those AA.AuId where the names (AA.AuN) seem to fit John Smith (let's just add the orderby=logprob:desc):
https://api.labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/academic/v1.0/evaluate?&expr=Composite(AA.AuN=%27john%20smith%27)&count=100&attributes=AA.AuN,AA.AuId&orderby=logprob:desc&subscription-key={YOUR-KEY}
As a second step, if you have an Author ID AA.AuId (here, for example, 3038752200), use this to list their papers (ordered by year, in a descending manner orderby=Y:desc):
https://api.labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/academic/v1.0/evaluate?&expr=Composite(AA.AuId=3038752200)&count=100&attributes=AA.AuN,AA.AuId,DOI,Ti,VFN,Y&orderby=Y:desc&subscription-key={YOUR-KEY}
The approach would be more promising if you had an institutional affiliation as well. Then you could change the expr field to Composite(And(AA.AuN='{AUTHOR-NAME}',AA.AfId={AFFILIATION-ID})) so as to search for all {AUTHOR-NAMES} affiliated to {AFFILIATION-ID}.
I'm thinking the best way to create an endpoint that one of the filters be a composite key.
Per example, we have a rest service to search for orders:
/orders/
We can filter the orders by start and final date:
/orders?dt-start=2017-05-11T17:12Z&dt-final=2017-05-11T17:12Z
Until here, so far so good. But I would like to filter the orders by customer. The customer is identified by his type of document and number of this document.
So, something like this could be possible:
/orders?type=ID&number=123456789
But the type and number are query parameters that only work together, it's a composite key. But using query parameter - like the last example - seems that the API user can do too:
/orders?number=123456789
/orders?type=ID
But not makes sense. Yes, I could return an error in response (bad request) if only one of these parameters were passed, but this is not natural for who are reading the API endpoint.
Another strategy is combine type and number in the same parameter, but I never see this in any API.
/orders?document=ID-12345678
It's odd to me too. I prefer to use separated parameters instead of this.
So, there are a way to use query parameter and solve this problem in a more "elegant" way?
Thanks!
Don't make up a composite key, instead conditionally require the two params. This ins't bad and IMO is much cleaner than creating a composite key which isn't represented by the data (or resource).
I've done this before, so to help illustrate I'll point you to it. This resource is to query for CyberFacts. The query is bound by a date range. To get data, you can do one of two things.
You can say ?today=true, and get the data for today (equivalent to saying ?startDate=2017-05-13&endDate=2017-05-13)
You can use the startDate and endDate query parameters, however if you use one and not the other (eg ?startDate=2017-05-13) you will receive a 400 Bad Request status response on the query and a error message in the response body.
So in this case I've done a few things to make this work
Make a higher priority parameter (today overrides startDate and endDate)
Document the valid behaviors
Provide appropriate error responses
For you only #2 and #3 would be needed, I think. Not knowing all of your use cases, I would suggest using /orders?type=ID&number=123456789 and document that number is a require query param when type=ID, and also include the appropriate error (eg: "You queried for an Order by Type 'ID', however you did not provide a 'number' query parameter")
How about providing a default value for type, (such as 'ID') as a fallback if the type parameter is absent (I'd probably go for the most common/used document type depending on your situation).
While for the number parameter I would enforce it, i.e. by specifying that it is a required parameter (somewhere in the docs?). If absent, return a bad request.
My crystal report pulls data about books, including an identifier (isbn, issn order number etc.), author, and publisher.
The ID field stores multiple ways to identify the book. The report displays any of the identifiers for that record. If one book has two identifiers; issn and order number, the report currently displays one apparently at random.
How can I make it prioritise which type to use based on a preset order? I figured some sort of filter on the field could work, but I haven't figured out how. I can't edit the table, but I can use SQL within the report.
If all the different types of ID are stored in a single field, your best bet is to use a SQL Command inside your report to separate them into multiple virtual fields.
Go to Database Fields / Database Expert, expand the connection you want to use, and pick Add Command. From here you can write a custom SQL statement to grab the information you're currently using, and at the same time separate the ID field into multiple different fields (as far as the report will be concerned, anyway. The table will stay unchanged.)
The trick is to figure out how to write your command to do the separation. We don't know what your data looks like, so you're on your own from here.
Based on the very little information that you have provided and if i was to make a guess.I suggest you make use of the formula field in your report and then use something like this to accomplish your goal.
IF ISNULL{first_priority_field_name} OR {first_priority_field_name} = '' THEN
{second_priority_field_name}
ELSE
{first_priority_field_name}
Use nested IF statement in case there are more than 2 identifier fields.
I'm designing a REST API where you can search for data in different countries, but since you can search for the same thing, at the same time, in different countries (max 4), am I unsure of the best/correct way to do it.
This would work to start with to get data (I'm using cars as an example):
/api/uk,us,nl/car/123
That request could return different ids for the different countries (uk=1,us=2,nl=3), so what do I do when data is requested for those 3 countries?
For a nice structure I could get the data one at the time:
/api/uk/car/1
/api/us/car/2
/api/nl/car/3
But that is not very efficient since it hits the backend 3 times.
I could do this:
/api/car/?uk=1&us=2&nl=3
But that doesn't work very well if I want to add to that path:
/api/uk/car/1/owner
Because that would then turn into:
/api/car/owner/?uk=1&us=2&nl=3
Which doesn't look good.
Anyone got suggestions on how to structure this in a good way?
I answered a similar question before, so I will stick to that idea:
You have a set of elements -cars- and you want to filter it in some way. My advice is add any filter as a field. If the field is not present, then choose one country based on the locale of the client:
mydomain.com/api/v1/car?countries=uk,us,nl
This field should dissapear when you look for a specific car or its owner
mydomain.com/api/v1/car/1/owner
because the country is not needed (unless the car ID 1 is reused for each country)
Update:
I really did not expect the id of the car can be shared by several cars, an ID should be unique (like a primary key in a database). Then, it makes sense to keep the country parameter with the owner's search:
mydomain.com/api/v1/car/1/owner?countries=uk,us
This should return a list of people who own a car with the id 1... but for me this makes little sense as a functionality, in this search I'll only allow one country:
mydomain.com/api/v1/car/1/owner?country=uk
Is it possible to form an Endeca query to retrieve a field that must start with certain letters? Say like get all users who's first letter is A? I checked with Range filters but it is supporting only numerical fields as well as Wild card search. But nothing worked well so far.
Creating a dimension is one way of approaching the problem as Paul Lemke mentioned.Wildcard is not an option since the performance overhead as well as irrelevant records.
But we solved it using couple of other alternatives.
Create a new property for the Object called "StartWith", store the first letter of the Object and make it searchable. We found it easier than creating a Dimension.
There is a problem where letters like 'A' are usually stop words in Endeca. We can do you a couple of work around to solve this.
Get the ASCII value of the first letter and store the numerical value in to that property. One more advantage with this approach is that we can use Range Filters. But you can't search for 'AB' kind of requirements.
Pre-pend some characters like ^^^My name and search for ^^^M. The advantage with this approach is you can search conditions like letters starts with AB.
Endeca at it's current version (6.1) does not have a search filter that works like a "startswith" function in other programming languages.
I do have two options that might possibly get you close:
If you are truly only looking for the first letter you can setup a Dimension value for each letter of the Alphabet (A,B,C...). You can then refine on each letter and see only the values that start with letter A, B, C, etc. The only downside to this is you can only filter based on how many dimension values you setup. So if you added "A", you couldn't filter anything that started with "AB". You could go down the line and add "AB", "BA, "CA", and so on but that would get unwieldy very fast.
If you want something closer to a "startswith" function the only other option is to use a wildcard search. Basically you would do a property search like this: N=0&Ntk=Username&Ntt=ab*
The trick with wildcard searching is it will do that across multiple words in that property. So assuming you had a data set of these values:
Smithers Smith
Larry Smith
Jenna-Smith
Doing a search of sm* would actually return all 3 results because "sm" was in their last name. Even the one with the dash would return as Endeca think's that is a seperate word. (It might be possible to turn that off though, not sure).
So basically it comes down to this: Stick a one word in a property, set that property to allow wildcard search, then do a "blah*" against that property and you should have the results you're looking for.
Have you tried the First relevance rank module which is supposed to rank based on proximity to the beginning of the field?
It sounds similar to what you are looking for and together with a wild card may produce your intended results.