GSoC 2020 - Week 12

This was the last week of my GSoC 2020. The main focus for this week was on completing any kind of left over work from previous phases, removing any bugs and adding documentation, basically, to get our work polished and ready for the next release of hydrus.

Multiple resource type collections

Majority of my time in the last two weeks was spent on adding support for Multiple resource type collections.
After PR for Treating Collection as a resource got merged, hydrus had support for treating collections as a resource.
But in that implementation, collections were restricted to only a collection of a single type class.

Also, as described in the spec, collections are described as a ‘set of somehow related resources‘. This would also mean that a collection might also be a set of classes of different types.

We need to add support for this type of collections too.

The support for this feature was added in this PR.

Example usage after changes made

1) PUT on /collection/
The request body should have the list of @ids of class instances which would be grouped into a collection.
NOTE: These instances should exist in the database before grouping them into a collection.
For eg,

{
  "@type": "LogEntryCollection",
  "members": [
    {
      "@id": "/serverapi/Drone/4ff14a9e-9cd0-4e8a-9c11-86ac9bec211f",
      "@type": "Drone"
    },
    {
      "@id": "/serverapi/LogEntry/aab38f9d-516a-4bb2-ae16-068c0c5345bd",
      "@type": "LogEntry"
    }
  ]
}

In the above example, a LogEntry instance with id(primary key) ‘aab38f9d-516a-4bb2-ae16-068c0c5345bd’ and a Drone instance with id(primary key) ‘4ff14a9e-9cd0-4e8a-9c11-86ac9bec211f’ already exist in the database.
This adds data in the ‘LogEntryCollection’ table.

Example response:

{
    "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/hydra/context.jsonld",
    "@type": "Status",
    "description": "Object with ID 50ed3b68-9437-4c68-93d4-b67013b9d412 successfully added",
    "statusCode": 201,
    "title": "Object successfully added."
}

2) GET on /collection/id

Example endpoint: /LogEntryCollection/50ed3b68-9437-4c68-93d4-b67013b9d412

Example response:

Will return all the members belonging to the collection with given collection_id. The members returned are all hydra:Links.

{
  "@context": "/serverapi/contexts/LogEntryCollection.jsonld",
  "@id": "/serverapi/LogEntryCollection/50ed3b68-9437-4c68-93d4-b67013b9d412",
  "@type": "LogEntryCollection",
  "members": [
    {
      "@id": "/serverapi/LogEntry/aab38f9d-516a-4bb2-ae16-068c0c5345bd",
      "@type": "hydra:Link"
    },
    {
      "@id": "/serverapi/Drone/4ff14a9e-9cd0-4e8a-9c11-86ac9bec211f",
      "@type": "hydra:Link"
    }
  ]
}

Other work

Other than working on the above feature, I spent fixing a minor bug in hydrus.
The PR for this fix is here.

Also, added documentation(much needed, for open source projects) on utilizing the new endpoints for managing collections. Also, updated old docs where necessary.
The PR for the same is here.

Learnings / Work done

I became more adept using the tools in the HydraEcosystem.

My PRs in this period:

• Add support for multiple resource type collections - PR #493
• Fix docker bug in hydrus - PR #496
• Documention for hydrus - PR #82

Next Steps

As, this week marks the culmination of the period of my Google Summer of Code 2020 journey, it was quite emotional for me.
I had one of the best experiences of my life contributing to HydraEcosystem.org during this period. I learnt a lot in the last 4 months of GSoC. From working as a team to collaborating on open source software.

I have also been added the HydraEcosystem organisation. I will use this opportunity to keep contributing to HydraEcosystem[and other open source projects too;)] even after my GSoC 2020 period. I have talked to with my mentors on the other interesting stuff they are working in the organisation and how I could possibly start working on them.

To sum it up, I think this is a start to my journey in open source software rather than end to my GSoC period.

Happy contributing, y’all!