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APIs for relation (or association) Services may are currently expected to follow the API model for entity services, at least for the core operations of CRUD and search. Some differencesSearch. One notable difference to the APIs for relation services:
- The payloads for relation services will differ from those for entity services. Generally, they may be expected to:
- Contain unique identifiers for two or more entities, which are used to associate those entities.
Follows the model of the Description operation for Entity Services.
REST-based APIs for Task Services
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- Contain other information units that are unique to relation services. These may include:
- A Reason why the entities are being associated. In some instances, the reason may be an identifier for another entity. Example: a CollectionObject and Location may be associated, when the location of that object changes as a result of being assigned to an Exhibit or a Loan. In that case, the identifier for the relevant Exhibit or Loan would be the value of the Reason.
- Temporal values, such as a timestamp indicating when the entities were associated and a second timestamp indicating when, if any, they are scheduled to no longer be associated. (Since that second timestamp may become out of sync with the value of the activity that might end the association, such as a timestamp for the end of an exhibit, that might become out of date if the end of that exhibit is subsequently changed, we might instead consider a different method for modeling the termination of associations.)
- Contain other information units that are unique to relation services. These may include:
As one notable "behind the scenes" difference:
- There may be Workflow associated with associations.
REST-based APIs for Task Services
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There are no standard REST-based APIs associated with task services. Most frequently, these are implemented in the REST RPC paradigm, where the name of a task service is included in the request URL, followed by query parameters that pass arguments to the service; e.g. /nameOfTaskService?...
However, for consistency with the resource-oriented, REST-based APIs above, we might instead model task services as resources. For some potential patterns that we might use for doing so, see "Handling arbitrary actions" in RESTful Service - Ajax Patterns.
Service Discovery
Description
Follows the model of the Description operation for Entity Services.
References
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