Hyperlinks

A hypermedia API provides an entry point to the API, which contains hyperlinks the clients can follow. Just like a human user of a regular website, who knows the initial URL of a website and then follows hyperlinks to navigate through the site. This has the advantage that the client only needs to understand how to detect and follow links. The URLs (apart from the initial entry point) and other details of the API can change without breaking the client.

For example, when we query the projects entry point, the end of the call returns the hyperlinks:

http

GET projects HTTP/1.1
Host: www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/ws/archive/
Accept: application/json

curl

curl -i http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/ws/archive/projects -H 'Accept: application/json'

python-requests

requests.get('http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/ws/archive/projects', headers={'Accept': 'application/json'})

The first part of the result response contains the PRIDE projects:

{
   _embedded: {
       projects: [
            {
              accession: "PRD000001",
              title: "COFRADIC proteome of unstimulated human blood platelets",
              additionalAttributes: null,
              projectDescription: "Not available",
              sampleProcessingProtocol: "Not available",
              dataProcessingProtocol: "Not available",
              projectTags: [ ],
              keywords: ["Not available"],
              doi: null,
              submissionDate: "2004-01-01",
              publicationDate: "2005-12-09",
              updatedDate: null,
              submitters: [
                  {
                    title: "Mr",
                    affiliation: "HUPO Plasma Proteome Project",
                    email: "lennart.martens@UGent.be"
                  }
              ],
              labPIs: [ ],
              affiliations: [
                    "HUPO Plasma Proteome Project"
              ],
              instruments: [
                {
                  accession: "MS:1000031",
                  name: "instrument model",
                  value: "Micromass Q-TOF I",
                  cvLabel: "MS",
                  id: "MS:1000031"
              }],
              softwares: [
                {
                  accession: "MS:1000531",
                  name: "software",
                  value: null,
                  cvLabel: "MS",
                  id: "MS:1000531"
                }
              ]
       ...

The last part of the each Project Object response contains the hyperlinks that allows to navigate each methods of an object:

_links: {
     self: {
          href: "http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/ws/archive/projects/PRD000001"
     },
     files: {
          href: "http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/ws/archive/projects/PRD000001/files?filter=&pageSize=100&page=0"
     }
 }

The self hyperlink is an entry point to the full information of the Project including all the data for the files, the _files_ entry point only provided the list of files that belongs to the Project.

• Hyperlinks in Lists