RecordType

Overview

RecordTypes act as templates for Records. They provide a description for a type of Record and define which Properties could, should, or must be present. Properties come with an importance attribute which tells the user or client program how strongly necessary the Property is. (As all other entities,) RecordTypes can inherit from other RecordTypes (or any Entities). When RecordTypes inherit from other RecordTypes, the inheritance flag tells which properties shall be inherited from the parents to the children.

Importance

The importance value of a Property states whether it may, should, or must be present in all children of this Entity. The table below lists the possible importances, together with the default behavior of the server when the property is not present in a child.

Importance	Meaning	Consequence when omitted
`OBLIGATORY`	Property must be present	Can be forced to be committed the server, but usually an error will be returned.
`RECOMMENDED`	Property should be present (makes sense for most users)	No consequence right now, but in future versions a warning will be returned.
`SUGGESTED` (default)	Property may be present (may make sense for some users)	No negative consequence
`FIX`	Property is not present in any child	—

The default behavior can be overridden for individual transaction by setting the force-missing-obligatory flag to ERROR (the default), WARN, or IGNORE. These flags cause a transaction that would result in an entity with a missing obligatory property to return an error, a warning, or to execute without a warning, respectively. The importance value FIX is used for properties that are specific to the Entity itself and is explained below.

Note

Note that in contrast to RecordTypes, all properties of a Record have the importance FIX since in general, even in the case of a Record having children, its properties are not inherited.

Inheritance

The inheritance flag specifies which Properties are inherited from the parent RecordType(s) to the child.

Inheritance	Meaning
None (default)	Nothing is inherited
`OBLIGATORY`	Properties of importance `OBLIGATORY` and above
`RECOMMENDED`	Properties of importance `RECOMMENDED` and above
`SUGGESTED`	Properties of importance `SUGGESTED` and above
`ALL`	Copy everything from the parent.

Note that inheritance ALL is essentially the same as SUGGESTED right now, but this behavior might change in the future. Also note that properties of importance FIX are never inherited this way. This is precisely what this importance level is meant for: properties that are specific to the parent entity and are not inherited by default. You can still add this property to the child manually if you wish, though, but this is not covered by the automatic inheritance.

Note

The behavior of inheritance is currently not well-defined if the child is a Record, not a RecordType.

Examples

Warning

The following examples have not been updated in a while and may serve as a starting point, but are not guaranteed to be fully applicable to the most recent versions of CaosDB.

GET Requests

Single-Get

Request:

GET http://localhost:8122/RecordType/1

Response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response>
    <RecordType id="1" name="Experiment" description="Description Experiment">
      <Property id="1" name="explanation" type="text" description="explains the thing" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" exponent="0" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="6" name="startDate" type="datetime" description="start" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="7" name="stopDate" type="datetime" description="stop" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="12" name="file" type="file" description="file" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
  </Response>

Multi-Get

Request:

GET http://localhost:8122/RecordType/1&2&3

Response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response>
    <RecordType id="1" name="Experiment" description="Description Experiment">
      <Property id="1" name="explanation" type="text" description="explains the thing" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" exponent="0" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="6" name="startDate" type="datetime" description="start" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="7" name="stopDate" type="datetime" description="stop" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="12" name="file" type="file" description="file" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
    <RecordType id="2" name="Measurement" description="Description Measurement">
      <Property id="1" name="explanation" type="text" description="explains the thing" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" exponent="0" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="6" name="startDate" type="datetime" description="start" importance="obligatory" />
      <Property id="7" name="stopDate" type="datetime" description="stop" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="12" name="file" type="file" description="file" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
    <RecordType id="3" name="Video" description="Description Video">
      <Property id="1" name="explanation" type="text" description="explains the thing" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="6" name="startDate" type="datetime" description="start" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="12" name="file" type="file" description="file" importance="obligatory" />
    </RecordType>
  </Response>

Get all

Request:

GET http://localhost:8122/RecordType/
GET http://localhost:8122/RecordType

Response:

Note

Outdated? At least the bug tracker doesn’t exist anymore.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response />

POST Requests

Request is to be send to:

POST http://localhost:8122/RecordType/
POST http://localhost:8122/RecordType/

Single-Post

HTTP Body:

<Post>
  <RecordType name="TimmsRecordType11" >
    <Property id="3" importance="recommended"/>
    <Property id="4" importance="obligatory"/>
    <Property name="age" />
  </RecordType>
</Post>

Response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response>
    <RecordType id="40" name="TimmsRecordType11">
      <Property id="3" name="name" type="text" description="Name" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
  </Response>

Multi-Post

HTTP Body:

<Post>
  <RecordType name="TimmsRecordType11" >
    <Property id="3" importance="recommended"/>
    <Property id="4" importance="obligatory"/>
    <Property name="age" />
  </RecordType>
  <RecordType name="TimmsRecordType12" >
    <Property id="6" importance="recommended"/>
    <Property id="7" importance="obligatory"/>
    <Property id="15" />
  </RecordType>
</Post>

Response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response>
    <RecordType id="40" name="TimmsRecordType11" description="null">
      <Property id="3" name="name" type="text" description="Name" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" importance="suggested" />
      <Property id="3" name="name" type="text" description="Name" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="4" name="id" type="integer" description="identifier" exponent="0" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
    <RecordType id="41" name="TimmsRecordType12">
      <Property id="6" name="startDate" type="datetime" description="start" importance="recommended" />
      <Property id="7" name="stopDate" type="datetime" description="stop" importance="suggested" />
      <Property id="15" name="TimmsIntProperty" type="integer" unit="kg" description="This is TimmsIntProperty" importance="suggested" />
    </RecordType>
  </Response>

DELETE RecordTypes

HTTP-DELETE-requests are to be send to http://${host}:${port}/RecordType/.... Default port is 8123.

Example

DELETE http://${host}:${port}/RecordType/1&2&3&4