#20 Querying Fedora collections

[Scott Yeadon]

Submitted by Christiaan Kortekaas, UQ:

How do you determine what a Fedora collection is? There isn't really a
standard fedora collection that you could access through a direct call to
sql to the fedora sql database.

We use the rels-ext isMemberOf thing but that's not exactly logically the
same as a collection as Dspace would know it. As you COULD have circular
isMemberOf relationships in fedora. For fedora it would be better to not
even consider collections or make them optional somehow and just look at
each object.

For Fez we have our own index set of tables (which about to change with Fez
2 committing to the trunk this week). So the sql for querying anything for
collection membership should probably be a config variable (not hardcoded in
aons2 java).

Also by Fedora API I don't mean the java api - I mean the fedora web api
services API-A (SOAP) and API-A-Lite (REST).

If you make it specific to a pg or mysql db connection you are going to
leave out the users that won't use these dbs. So it would be better to use
the fedora apis here:
http://www.fedora.info/wiki/index.php/API-A-Lite_Methods

Have you tested against fedora 2.2/2.2.1 or only 2.1/2.1.1?

The API-A calls change a little between each, so if you only support one,
support 2.2.*

Although to get directory paths for the files themselves the only way maybe
to call the fedora sql db direct - sadly I don't think the api's will expose
these. The only way to get the files to scan via the api is to get a list of
their datastreams that are M type (files) and scan them over http eg
http://localhost:8080/fedora/get/UQ:123/superpdf.pdf

That would be a less hacky and more api correct way to interact with
fedora...