From: Fischlin A. <and...@en...> - 2012-09-11 10:27:16
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Dear Adam, Many thanks. All the links to the source code you gave me helps me a lot to understand the situation much better. A pity this is so elaborate. In the meantime our case with Thomson Reuters resulted in directing us to a web site, of which the answer e-mail claimed, it would supersede the sites we discussed previously. Here is that URL, since it may also be of interest: http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/products/related/webservices/ Despite all being very helpful what you wrote, it is certainly not good news. And I share several of your concerns only too easily. I am willing to help. My first step along this lines is currently to continue insisting that the company really helps us. My institution is paying AFAIK huge amounts of subscription fees, yet nobody seems to have informed us of the consequences of the transition as end of August nor do they really help at the moment to overcome the difficulties. The information they have provided so far are all very conflicting and no real progress can be seen. Obviously as an end-user one has to insist they help, given the way they have handled us during this recent transition, or we will never get anywhere. The case only exists, because I complained insistingly, which finally did trigger this case and so far a few reactions. However, would it not be easier not to work with Mountain Lion first, in particular to overcome the caveats of the new protocol? Say, using the reliable Snow Leopard (or Lion, but I wouldn't use the word reliable in this case ;-) ). Once understood it might work even under Mountain Lion? One further thought: Such SOAP like protocols (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol)) may be of interest also in other cases. Would it not be more robust for BibDesk to develop a generic module that can handle such queries while the syntax specifics of any given protocol are described with a meta language, e.g. similar as attributed EBNF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBNF) this can do for programing languages. Then BibDesk could be extended by any query by simply providing the protocol description in form of that language? What is your experience with these interfaces? Are they clean? Formally well designed or are they all just tedious, cumbersome patchwork full of idiosyncrasies? Regards, Andreas On 11/09/2012, at 01:17 , Adam R. Maxwell wrote: On Sep 10, 2012, at 14:48 , Fischlin Andreas <and...@en...<mailto:and...@en...>> wrote: Dear Adam, Many thanks for this most valuable information. Indeed, in the meantime I got a confirmation from company Thomson Reuters that they have switched from version 1.0 to 2.0 of their web services, including the SOAP access as of 31st August 2012. Well, that's a pretty clear indication of what has happened. Unfortunately I need very urgently ISI WOS in BibDesk back. Any idea what could be done? New WS stub code [1] has to be generated with WSMakeStubs, it has to be checked for bugs, and then glue code has to be written to integrate the new service into BibDesk [2]. This last is the only significant task, and based on my cursory glance last week, it'll be a fairly extensive rewrite. BDSKISIWebServices.[hm] will be replace entirely, and BDSKISIGroupServer.m will have to be rewritten to use the new methods and error checking. [1] http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIWebServices.m?revision=18776&view=markup [2] http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIGroupServer.m?revision=18776&view=markup I'd guess 4-8 hours work, assuming the new API is straightforward and not too different from the old one, but I have very low confidence in those assumptions, and I have no time to look at this myself before October. Notably I have for sure following questions for the time being: 1) Where are search details as contained in a .bdsksearch file actually stored in BibDesk once such a search has been installed? I have consulted the help pages, and examples of .bdsksearch files are also not that difficult to construct from scratch. But this all did not answer me this question. Have I overlooked something or is it really missing. Those files are largely irrelevant for WoS searches; they just store a database name and human-readable counterpart. Local additions should end up in ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/SearchGroupServers. 2) What URL is "Searches -> Web of Science SCI" using? In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me this question, but I do not know what to answer. The default endpoint is http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve See link [1] for details. 3) Can I edit or at least see Web of Science SCI search specs at the XML level? Is there a way to edit a search once its .bdsksearch file has been installed? I looked for plist files, but neither inside the application BibDesk nor in ~/Library/Application Support could I find the wanted information. No. It will require writing Objective-C code. Queries are constructed in -[BDSKISIGroupServer downloadWithSearchTerm:database:] and passed off to the generated WS code. The bdsksearch files will not help you at all here, so forget about them. 4) Can I look at a SOAP protocol during an attempt to access the ISI WOS service? In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me for the exact error message that was returned, but I can not answer that question unless I could look at the protocol of a query using SOAP access. It should be logged to the console, if Apple gives it to us. Apple's WebServices code is utter crap, to put it mildly. It has longstanding bugs and feature gaps which have been ignored since it was introduced in 10.2. Rather than address those problems, Apple has deprecated their WebServicesCore framework in 10.8, with no replacement that I can find. Typical. Anyway, this latter point is something to keep in mind when working with Web Services on the Mac; Apple's framework problems can make things really hard to debug, so my estimates on time for this could be way off. I used SUDS in Python for another project this year, and it was so much nicer that it wasn't even funny. In fact, it would be tempting to look at the feasibility of bundling that with BibDesk, and writing a separate Python tool to do the WS search. -- Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bib...@li... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users |