wiki:Dev/INTREPID/7

Version 4 (modified by pferreir, 2 years ago) (diff)

timezone info

    1. InTRePId 7
      1. Objectives
      2. Status quo
      3. Description
        1. Requirements
        2. Specification details ===
          1. Time zone support ====
        3. Examples
      4. Comments

InTRePId 7

Title: An HTTP API for Data Export

Author: Pedro Ferreira

Date: April 2011

Target version: v0.98

Status: draft

Objectives

  • Creating a centralized data access API for Indico;
  • Replacing the existing export scripts (export.py...) with something more usable and possibly more efficient;
  • Enabling the quick implementation of export capabilities for different data formats;
  • Allowing access to protected information, through the use of some authentication mechanism;
  • Introducing some kind of control/logging mechanism that allows us to know who is using what and how often;
  • Introducing defense mechanisms against abusive uses of the API;
  • Creating extension points that allow different plugins to use this mechanism and add their own data;

Status quo

Currently, a series of scripts are used in order to provide data from Indico in different formats:

  • export.py - enables access to HTML, XML, RSS and iCal listings of events contained in specific categories and following specific date spans;
  • exportReservations.py - provides XML and CSV lists of reservations between a specified date span;
  • RSS/iCal interfaces - same as export.py (for the corresponding formats), with the addition that they apply only to upcoming events, and that the iCal interface can also export the components of an event (contributions);

Description

Requirements

  • A basic "as REST as possible" HTTP API for data export;
  • An easy to use, flexible and intuitive query URL syntax;
  • Support for different data formats;
    • XML
    • JSON/JSONP
    • HTML 4 snippets (with proper CSS classes);
    • RSS
    • iCal
    • CSV ?
    • HTML 5 with CSS and microdata ?
    • YAML ?
    • RDF ?
  • A safe and easy to use authentication mechanism;
  • HTTPS support (HTTPS only?);
  • Reasonable load on Indico/DB, obtained among others through caching of results;
  • Support for an "API key" kind of mechanism, including a list of authorized users/keys and their access level as well as some access statistics;
  • Timezone support - both for querying and display of results;

Specification details ===

Time zone support ====

Some deatails about timezone support:

  • API users should be able to specify a timezone in which the results should be displayed; Otherwise, results should be displayed in their original timezones;
  • If a user specifies a timezone (previous point), the API should consider that all other parameters (start date, etc...) are in the same timezone.

Examples

[
  {
    id: 1234,
    title: "An event",
    datetime: { date: "2011-03-01",
                time: "20:00" }
  }
]

Comments

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