REuPathDB

REuPathDB_1.0-0.tar.gz (18 July 2013)

This package provides an interface to the Web Services of Eukaryotic Pathogen Database Resources, specifically the REST API and the collection methods. For each general method, there are two forms: JSON and XML. These return JSON and XML content respectively but the methods take the same inputs.

This package was motivated by Olivier Lucas wondering how to interface to the Web service. Since the service is described by a collection of Web Application Description Language (WADL) documents, we can programmatically explore those documents and extract descriptions of the different methods and their documentation. From this, we generate R code. This is done with the general WADL package.

We have now modified the code generation (see generate2.R) to this specific interface so that we generate a single R function to access the Web Service method for the JSON and the XML forms. One can specify .json = TRUE or .json = FALSE to use the JSON or XML version, respectively.

Examples

• Examples of function calls

Code Generation

In addition to the generated code, the top-level directory in the source package contains R code to

• retrieve the WADL files
• generate the code from the WADLs
• test the generated code
• test the API manually
• a manually written R function that illustrates the target or acts as a template.