[Evergreen-dev] Fieldmapper usage for vendor making api calls

[Jeff Davis]

Gateways with hash-based input/output would be amazing! Bill's Rust project sounds very exciting.

Maybe we could use Galen's suggestions as a starting point for some official documentation about how to use the API for third-party applications? It sounds like there are best practices that aren't documented anywhere (as far as I know).

________________________________________
From: Evergreen-dev <evergreen-dev-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org> on behalf of Bill Erickson via Evergreen-dev <evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2023 8:44 AM
To: Galen Charlton
Cc: Evergreen Development
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-dev] Fieldmapper usage for vendor making api calls

What Galen said.

--

If we want to talk about the future, the community has previously discussed and experimented with delivering hash-based data via certain APIs so the IDL is not required.  This can simplify implementation for new vendors and avoid the "data shifted" issues that can occur with stale IDLs.

As part of the Redis project, I created Rust variants of the Websockets and HTTP gateways which contain runtime options to use hash-based input and output.

E.g. https://redis.demo.kclseg.org/eg-http-gateway?service=open-ils.actor&method=open-ils.actor.org_tree.retrieve&format=hashfull

Once we're running Redis at KCLS, I plan to deploy the Rust variants.  If all goes well, I expect this will be our default for vendor API access and some one-off patron interfaces going forward.

-b


On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 9:56 AM Galen Charlton via Evergreen-dev <evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org<mailto:evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org>> wrote:
Hi,

Having the app consult the IDL is indeed the way to go. This ideally should happen on startup, although it would be reasonable to cache the results, potentially for fairly lengthy durations. The 24 hours you suggest should generally be fine, although it could still lead to some friction for patrons the day after an Evergreen upgrade. Triggers for updating the cached IDL values would include:

- a change in Evergreen version number as reported by opensrf.open-ils.system.ils_version
- a change in file modification date reported by an HTTP HEAD request on /reports/fm_IDL.xml

Parsing /reports/fm_IDL.xml will work, but alternatives to parsing the whole IDL (most of which is presumably irrelevant to the app) is parsing the output of /IDL2js. This can be restricted to only the class of interested, e.g., /IDL2js?acp,au

Regards,

Galen

On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 8:55 AM Josh Stompro via Evergreen-dev <evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org<mailto:evergreen-dev at list.evergreen-ils.org>> wrote:
Hello, I was working with Solus on some breakage of their app after our upgrade to 3.11.  The issue was related to the fields ordering changing in the results to  service=open-ils.auth method=open-ils.auth.session.retrieve.

When they initially set it up, they just went by the index number of each result, but that changed due to actor.usr changes over the years.

I suggested that they could take a look at  /reports/fm_IDL.xml for the new ordering, and they quickly setup a system to grab that file every 24 hours and use it to access the fields for api results.  I just wanted to double check to see if that is the recommended way to handle things if they have customers with different versions of evergreen?  Is there a simpler approach that would be better?

Thanks
Josh
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