Procedure Call Parameters

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.