Proposed Rights Database API

Initial Setup

git clone https://github.com/hathitrust/rights_api
cd rights_api
docker compose build
docker compose run --rm web bundle install
docker compose up -d

Naming Conventions

• The Rights Database is replete with abbreviations. Field and table names exposed by this API are de-abbreviated:
  • "attr" becomes "attribute"
  • "dscr" becomes "description"
  • "stmt" becomes "statement"
• Spurious prefixes are eliminated:
  • a_attr and a_access_profile become attr and access_profile (attr is further de-abbreviated as above)
• For the sake of brevity, rights_current (the star of the show) is exposed as rights in URLs.

Examples

"All Items" Queries

Note: there is a default limit of 1000 items in the returned dataset. Pagination is not yet implemented, but none of the test tables are anywhere near that large.

http://localhost:4567/v1/access_profiles
http://localhost:4567/v1/access_statements      # access_stmts table
http://localhost:4567/v1/access_statements_map  # access_stmts_map table
http://localhost:4567/v1/attributes
http://localhost:4567/v1/reasons
http://localhost:4567/v1/rights/                # rights_current table
http://localhost:4567/v1/rights_log/
http://localhost:4567/v1/sources/

"One Item" Queries

Note: rights (rights_current) and rights_log take HTIDs, access_statements takes a stmt_key, access_statements_map takes a composite a_attr.a_access_profile key. All other take a standard integer key.

http://localhost:4567/v1/access_profiles/1
http://localhost:4567/v1/access_statements/pd             # access_stmts table
http://localhost:4567/v1/access_statements_map/pd.google  # access_stmts_map table
http://localhost:4567/v1/attributes/1
http://localhost:4567/v1/reasons/1
http://localhost:4567/v1/rights/test.pd_google            # rights_current table
http://localhost:4567/v1/rights_log/test.pd_google
http://localhost:4567/v1/sources/1

See lib/rights_api/app.rb for all of the Sinatra routes.

Results

All API results, even 404s (which should only occur with a bad Sinatra route) should return the same general JSON structure. Here's the empty variant:

{
  "total":0,
  "start":0,
  "end":0,
  "data":[]
}

total is the number of query results. start and end are the one-based indexes of the current OFFSET, LIMIT slice. (The zeroes here are the empty result special case.) data is an array of hashes, one hash per row.

Here's a truncated result from http://localhost:4567/v1/access_profiles:

{
  "total":4,
  "start":1,
  "end":4,
  "data":[
    {
      "id":1,
      "name":"open",
      "description":"Unrestricted image and full-volume download (e.g. Internet Archive)"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

400 error results from bogus parameters (e.g., &limit=blah) will have an additional error Field in the return structure. This is human-readable and may include a backtrace, we're not sure yet.

Testing

The test suite is divided into unit and integration tests which can be run separately to give some orthogonality in checking for coverage gaps.

# Full test suite
docker-compose run --rm web
# Standard
docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec standardrb
# Unit
docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rspec spec/unit
# Integration
docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rspec spec/integration

Debugging

To run an IRB session with LOAD_PATH set up:

docker compose run --rm test bundle exec bin/irb_session.rb

TODO

See DEV-990

• /rights?... query parameters other than HTID (dates, for example)
• /rights_log?... query parameters other than HTID (dates, for example)
• Results paging