The basics
For all of the above API procedure calls to MOBY Central the following
statements are true:
- The procedure call is SOAP RPC-style
- The procedure name is the name of the API procedure
- The XML payload has one of the structures defined below
- Calls will fail if the structure is incorrect in any way.
- In the case of registration calls, failure will be represented as
a Registration object with success = "0"
- In the case of retrieval calls, failure will be silent and an
empty object of the associated output type will be returned.
Input/output is described in terms of articles
In many cases procedure calls to MOBY Central necessitate description
of the inputs and/or outputs from a service; either to achieve the
registration of that service as a service provider, or for subsequent
service discovery by a client. Such input/output is described using
articles, which come in two types:
Primary and
Secondary.
For example, in a hypothetical BLAST service the Sequence would be a
Primary input article, the e-value-cutoff would be a Secondary Input
article, and the Blast report output would be a Primary output
article. To take another example, a standard deviation score might
optionally be provided as a secondary output article by an "averaging
service", where its presence/absence depends on the value of the
Secondary Input article "includeSD".
Articles are
required to be named using the
articleName
attribute. These are to assist the server-side parsers to identify
particular inputs, e.g. if the service requires named inputs. The
order of articles in a single Input or Output set
must not be
meaningful.