[ckan-dev] Tags REST API update

Thu Jul 21 16:50:45 UTC 2011

2011/7/21 Adrià Mercader <amercadero at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> Working on the refactoring of the controllers, I found a small
> incongruence in the tags REST API.
>
> In the groups case, if you query:
> http://test.ckan.net/api/2/rest/group
> you get a list of all group ids, and querying
> http://test.ckan.net/api/2/rest/group/0ac963e7-ba29-49bc-83c8-98f8c1991649
> gives you the details of the group, including the packages contained
>
> Similarly,
> http://test.ckan.net/api/2/rest/tag
> gives you a list of all the tag names (not ids! Is this intentional?).

Yes this was intentional. A tag object is seen to be an immutable
string. This makes the id we store internally irrelevant.

> But querying a specific tag:
> http://test.ckan.net/api/2/rest/tag/country-uk
> only returns the list of ids of packages that have that tag.

Yes this is correct.

> Is anyone against that on the new version of the API /rest/tag/<id>
> returns a JSON object with the details of the tag (including of course
> the packages)?

I can see that it would make the internal logic more consistent, and
maybe a client that treats all our objects the same, having an ID and
other properties. But the fact remains that a tag is simply an
immutable string, with no other properties about from its links to
Packages, so how it is now is the simplest and most understandable
thing. So I think it's a balance of simplicity vs consistency and
either is arguable.

Dave

>
>
> Adrià
>
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