[ckan-dev] How to access an array in extra-fields ?

Thu Apr 28 13:55:10 UTC 2011

Hello *,

we encountered a Problem concerning accessing Arrays/Lists.

curl -XGET 'http://ckan.net/api/rest/package/hbz_unioncatalog'

will get you amongst others:

 "extras": {"publishingInstitution":
"[u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-605',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-290',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-38M',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-98',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-38',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-Kn41',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-82',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-107',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-929',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-Zw1',
u'http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-832']"}

but if I try to query this:

wget
'http://ckan.net/api/search/package?q=lobid&publishingInstitution="http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-605"'

I get only two packages, among the package "hbz_unioncatalog" is
missing. (These two packages have only one value for
"publishingInstitution").

The "extra/publishingInstitution"-Array was uploaded through a "curl
-XPUT ...
  "extras": {
    "publishingInstitution":[
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-605",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-290",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-38M",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-98",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-38",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-Kn41",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-82",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-107",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-929",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-Zw1",
      "http://lobid.org/organisation/DE-832"
    ]
    },
...

is there somethin wrong with?

Further, I discovered apparently a bug resp. an inconistency:
when editing this "extra/publishingInstitution"-Field by hand through
http://ckan.net/package/edit/hbz_unioncatalog
the array/list will be broken when saved.

Do you know what to I shall do?

-o