Chapter 5. Delivering Data Downstream: The Data Access Service (DAS)

Making records and associated digital objects catalogued with MetaToo available outside of MetaToo is done via communication through the Data Access Service, or DAS.

A client program can use DAS as a web service for retrieving records as well as for registering back informations for records and their associated digital objects.

This chapter describes the communication.

5.1. REST based DAS API for Retrieving Records

The DAS is called for record retrieval as http://yourserver/cgi-bin/yourapp_das?key=val&...&key=val, where the possible keys (and their values) are described below.

id

either a single record ID or a commaseparated list of record IDs.

timestamp

either a unix timestamp (seconds since EPOCH) or a timestamp in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS or 1957-03-20T20:30:00.

type

a record type

status

a comma separated list record status

where

an abitrary where clause which can be used to select records based, at this time, on the id, udate, cdate, status, grp, uid and type.

pad

if equal to 1, the XML returned will be indented

raw

if equal to 1, the records returned will be extractly like in the database and will not include, among other things, authority text mapping

gzip

if equal to 1, the result will be compressed with gzip

firstRecord

the number of the first record to be returned, starting from 1.

maxRecords

the maximum number of records returned.

key

the authentication key, which must match configuration file das.key, if it is defined