API Structure for an application - api-design

I would like some help to build something a la https://pokeapi.co/ .
I have a problem when I try to make the following structure:
"forms": [
{
"url": "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon-form/1/",
"name": "bulbasaur"
}
],
"stats": [
{
"stat": {
"url": "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/stat/6/",
"name": "speed"
},
"effort": 0,
"base_stat": 45
},
]
Directus works fine when I have one relation field such as forms (make a new relation field to forms, get Bulbasaur, done)
I would have build monster and the stat table, and I need to give a value to the relation field stat (in that case, speed) of 45.
I tried to fiddle around with Directus with no success.

Hey André – it seems like this is more of a database architecture question. But here is a schema I would use:
monsters
id
name
stats (ALIAS: Many-to-Many interface relationship)
monster_stats (Junction table for the many-to-many)
id
monster_id
stat_id
stats
id
name
effort
base_stat

Related

Serialized Entities displaying only ID

I'm using JMSSerializer and FOSRestBundle. I have a fairly typical object graph, including some recursion.
What I would like to accomplish is that included objects beyond a certain depth or in general are listed only with their ID, but when serialized directly, with all data.
So, for example:
Users => Groups => Users
when requesting /user/1 the result should be something like
{ "id": 1, "name": "John Doe", "groups": [ { "id": 10 }, { "id": 11 } ] }
While when I request /group/10 it would be:
{ "id": 10, "name": "Groupies", "users": [ { "id": 1 }, { "id": 2 }, { "id": 4 } ] }
With #MaxDeph I can hide the included arrays completely, so I get
{ "id": 1, "name": "John Doe", "groups": [] }
But I would like to include just the IDs so that the REST client can fetch them if it needs them, or consult his cache, or do whatever.
I know I can manually cobble this together using groups, but for consistency reasons I was wondering if I can somehow enable this behaviour in my entire application, maybe even with a reference to maxdepth so I can control where to include IDs and where to include full objects?
For the sake of those finding this:
I found no other solution, but doing this with groups works just fine and gives me the result I was looking for.

How to represent the Data Model of a Graph

So we have been developing some graph based analysis tools, using neo4j as a persistence engine in the background. As part of this we are developing a graph data model suitable for our domain, and we want to use this in the application layer to restrict the types of nodes, or to ensure that nodes of certain types must carry certain properties. Normal data model restrictions.
So thats the background, what I am asking is if there is some standard way to represent a data-model for a graph db? The graph equivalent of an xsd perhaps?
There's an open-source project supporting strong schema definitions in Neo4j: Structr (http://structr.org, see it in action: http://vimeo.com/structr/videos)
With Structr, you can define an in-graph schema of your data model including
Type inheritance
Supported data types: Boolean, String, Integer, Long, Double, Date, Enum (+ values)
Default values
Cardinality (1:1, 1:*, *:1)
Not-null constraints
Uniqueness constraints
Full type safety
Validation
Cardinality enforcement
Support for methods (custom action) is currently being added to the schema.
The schema can be edited with an editor, or directly via REST, modifiying the JSON representation of the data model:
{
"query_time": "0.001618446",
"result_count": 4,
"result": [
{
"name": "Whisky",
"extendsClass": null,
"relatedTo": [
{
"id": "96d05ddc9f0b42e2801f06afb1374458",
"name": "Flavour"
},
{
"id": "28f85dca915245afa3782354ea824130",
"name": "Location"
}
],
"relatedFrom": [],
"id": "df9f9431ed304b0494da84ef63f5f2d8",
"type": "SchemaNode",
"_name": "String"
},
{
"name": "Flavour",
...
},
{
"name": "Location",
...
},
{
"name": "Region",
...
}
],
"serialization_time": "0.000829985"
}
{
"query_time": "0.001466743",
"result_count": 3,
"result": [
{
"name": null,
"sourceId": "28f85dca915245afa3782354ea824130",
"targetId": "e4139c5db45a4c1cbfe5e358a84b11ed",
"sourceMultiplicity": null,
"targetMultiplicity": "1",
"sourceNotion": null,
"targetNotion": null,
"relationshipType": "LOCATED_IN",
"sourceJsonName": null,
"targetJsonName": null,
"id": "d43902ad7348498cbdebcd92135926ea",
"type": "SchemaRelationship",
"relType": "IS_RELATED_TO"
},
{
"name": null,
"sourceId": "df9f9431ed304b0494da84ef63f5f2d8",
"targetId": "96d05ddc9f0b42e2801f06afb1374458",
"sourceMultiplicity": null,
"targetMultiplicity": "1",
"sourceNotion": null,
"targetNotion": null,
"relationshipType": "HAS_FLAVOURS",
"sourceJsonName": null,
"targetJsonName": null,
"id": "bc9a6308d1fd4bfdb64caa355444299d",
"type": "SchemaRelationship",
"relType": "IS_RELATED_TO"
},
{
"name": null,
"sourceId": "df9f9431ed304b0494da84ef63f5f2d8",
"targetId": "28f85dca915245afa3782354ea824130",
"sourceMultiplicity": null,
"targetMultiplicity": "1",
"sourceNotion": null,
"targetNotion": null,
"relationshipType": "PRODUCED_IN",
"sourceJsonName": null,
"targetJsonName": null,
"id": "a55fb5c3cc29448e99a538ef209b8421",
"type": "SchemaRelationship",
"relType": "IS_RELATED_TO"
}
],
"serialization_time": "0.000403616"
}
You can access nodes and relationships stored in Neo4j as JSON objects through a RESTful API which is dynamically configured based on the in-graph schema.
$ curl try.structr.org:8082/structr/rest/whiskies?name=Ardbeg
{
"query_time": "0.001267211",
"result_count": 1,
"result": [
{
"flavour": {
"name": "J",
"description": "Full-Bodied, Dry, Pungent, Peaty and Medicinal, with Spicy, Feinty Notes.",
"id": "626ba892263b45e29d71f51889839ebc",
"type": "Flavour"
},
"location": {
"region": {
"name": "Islay",
"id": "4c7dd3fe2779492e85bdfe7323cd78ee",
"type": "Region"
},
"whiskies": [
...
],
"name": "Port Ellen",
"latitude": null,
"longitude": null,
"altitude": null,
"id": "47f90d67e1954cc584c868e7337b6cbb",
"type": "Location"
},
"name": "Ardbeg",
"id": "2db6b3b41b70439dac002ba2294dc5e7",
"type": "Whisky"
}
],
"serialization_time": "0.010824154"
}
In the UI, there's also a data editing (CRUD) tool, and CMS components supporting to create web applications on Neo4j.
Disclaimer: I'm a developer of Structr and founder of the project.
No, there's no standard way to do this. Indeed, even if there were, keep in mind that the only constraints that neo4j currently supports are uniqueness constraints.
Take for example some sample rules:
All nodes labeled :Person must have non-empty properties fname and lname
All nodes labeled :Person must have >= 1 outbound relationship of type :works_for
The trouble with the present neo4j is that even in the case where you did have a schema language (standardized) that could express these things, there wouldn't be a way that the db engine itself could actually enforce that constraint.
So the simple answer is no, there's no standard way of doing that right now.
A few tricks I've seen people use to simulate the same:
Assemble a list of "test suite" cypher queries, with known results. Query for things you know shouldn't be there; non-empty result sets are a sign of a problem/integrity violation. Query for things you know should be there; empty result sets are a problem.
Application-level control -- via some layer like spring-data or similar, control who can talk to the database. This essentially moves your data integrity/testing problem up into the app, away from the database.
It's a common (and IMHO annoying) aspect of many NoSQL solutions (not specifically neo4j) that because of their schema-weakness, they tend to force validation up the tech stack into the application. Doing these things in the application tends to be harder and more error-prone. SQL databases permit you to implement all sorts of schema constraints, triggers, etc -- specifically to make it really damn hard to put the wrong data into the database. The NoSQL databases typically either aren't there yet, or don't do this as a design decision. There are indeed flexibility/performance tradeoffs. Databases can insert faster and be more flexible to adapt quickly if they aren't burdened with checking each atom of data against a long list of schema rules.
EDIT: Two relevant resources: the metagraphs proposal talks about how you could represent the schema as a graph, and neoprofiler is an application that attempts to infer the actual structure of a neo4j database and show you its "profile".
With time, I think it's reasonable to hope that neo would include basic integrity features like requiring certain labels to have certain properties (the example above), restricting the data types of certain properties (lname must always be a String, never an integer), and so on. The graph data model is a bit wild and wooly though (in the computational complexity sense) and there are some constraints on graphs that people desperately would want, but will probably never get. An example would be the constraint that a graph can't have cycles in it. Enforcing that on the creation of every relationship would be very computationally intensive. (

Freebase MQL query - Get data by a social link

I'm having a hard time trying to get data about a person from Freebase using his social link - by a MQL query.
How could this be done?
Something like:
https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query={
"*":[{}],
"/common/topic/social_media_presence":[{
"value":"http://twitter.com/JustinBieber"
}]
}
Those links are really stored as keys and the links are generated from templates with they key plugged in. You can see all the keys here: https://www.freebase.com/m/06w2sn5?keys=
A modified version of your query would be:
[{
"key": [{
"namespace": {
"id": "/authority/twitter"
},
"value": "JustinBieber"
}],
"*": [{}]
}]
You can do the same thing with other namespaces like /authority/facebook or /authority/musicbrainz as well as the various language wikipedias e.g. /wikipedia/en
I'm not sure how complete the coverage or currency of the social media info is though...

Google Cloud Datastore runQuery returning 412 "no matching index found"

** UPDATE **
Thanks to Alfred Fuller for pointing out that I need to create a manual index for this query.
Unfortunately, using the JSON API, from a .NET application, there does not appear to be an officially supported way of doing so. In fact, there does not officially appear to be a way to do this at all from an app outside of App Engine, which is strange since the Cloud Datastore API was designed to allow access to the Datastore outside of App Engine.
The closest hack I could find was to POST the index definition using RPC to http://appengine.google.com/api/datastore/index/add. Can someone give me the raw spec for how to do this exactly (i.e. URL parameters, what exactly should the body look like, etc), perhaps using Fiddler to inspect the call made by appcfg.cmd?
** ORIGINAL QUESTION **
According to the docs, "a query can combine equality (EQUAL) filters for different properties, along with one or more inequality filters on a single property".
However, this query fails:
{
"query": {
"kinds": [
{
"name": "CodeProse.Pogo.Tests.TestPerson"
}
],
"filter": {
"compositeFilter": {
"operator": "and",
"filters": [
{
"propertyFilter": {
"operator": "equal",
"property": {
"name": "DepartmentCode"
},
"value": {
"integerValue": "123"
}
}
},
{
"propertyFilter": {
"operator": "greaterThan",
"property": {
"name": "HourlyRate"
},
"value": {
"doubleValue": 50
}
}
},
{
"propertyFilter": {
"operator": "lessThan",
"property": {
"name": "HourlyRate"
},
"value": {
"doubleValue": 100
}
}
}
]
}
}
}
}
with the following response:
{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "global",
"reason": "FAILED_PRECONDITION",
"message": "no matching index found.",
"locationType": "header",
"location": "If-Match"
}
],
"code": 412,
"message": "no matching index found."
}
}
The JSON API does not yet support local index generation, but we've documented a process that you can follow to generate the xml definition of the index at https://developers.google.com/datastore/docs/tools/indexconfig#Datastore_Manual_index_configuration
Please give this a shot and let us know if it doesn't work.
This is a temporary solution that we hope to replace with automatic local index generation as soon as we can.
The error "no matching index found." indicates that an index needs to be added for the query to work. See the auto index generation documentation.
In this case you need an index with the properties DepartmentCode and HourlyRate (in that order).
For gcloud-node I fixed it with those 3 links:
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-node/issues/369
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-node/blob/master/system-test/data/index.yaml
and most important link:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/indexconfig#Python_About_index_yaml to write your index.yaml file
As explained in the last link, an index is what allows complex queries to run faster by storing the result set of the queries in an index. When you get no matching index found it means that you tried to run a complex query involving order or filter. So to make your query work, you need to create your index on the google datastore indexes by creating a config file manually to define your indexes that represent the query you are trying to run. Here is how you fix:
create an index.yaml file in a folder named for example indexes in your app directory by following the directives for the python conf file: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/indexconfig#Python_About_index_yaml or get inspiration from the gcloud-node tests in https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-node/blob/master/system-test/data/index.yaml
create the indexes from the config file with this command:
gcloud preview datastore create-indexes indexes/index.yaml
see https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/preview/datastore/create-indexes
wait for the indexes to serve on your developer console in Cloud Datastore/Indexes, the interface should display "serving" once the index is built
once it is serving your query should work
For example for this query:
var q = ds.createQuery('project')
.filter('tags =', category)
.order('-date');
index.yaml looks like:
indexes:
- kind: project
ancestor: no
properties:
- name: tags
- name: date
direction: desc
Try not to order the result. After removing orderby(), it worked for me.

Relate two entities using properties in Freebase

I want to find out how Wenjin SU and Jimei University are related in Freebase. I have found out the Wenjin SU has a type /business/board_member/which has property/business/board_member/leader_of. How can I use this information in an Freebase MQL to extract the term or mid of Jimei University?
If you go to the Freebase page for Wenjin SU you see that he has the type /business/board_member/ and under that section it lists him as the /business/board_member/leader_of Jimei University
The first thing you should do is go to the Query Editor and create a skeleton MQL query for that relationship:
{
"id": "/m/0sxhm9v",
"name": null,
"/business/board_member/leader_of": [{}]
}
When you run this query you get the following result:
{
"result": {
"name": "Wenjin SU",
"/business/board_member/leader_of": [{
"name": null,
"type": [
"/organization/leadership"
],
"id": "/m/0sxhm9s"
}],
"id": "/m/0sxhm9v"
}
}
This is not quite what you were asking for. It's saying that he is the leader_of an un-named topic /m/0sxhm9s. Now, if you visit the Freebase page for that topic you'll see that its a mediator node that connects a person and their role to an organization for a specific date range. You'll also notice that Jimei University is listed as the /organization/leadership/organization on this page.
We can now add this mediated property to our MQL query to get the full relationship that you're looking for:
{
"id": "/m/0sxhm9v",
"name": null,
"/business/board_member/leader_of": [{
"/organization/leadership/organization": {
}
}]
}
If you're building an application that has a pre-determined set of relationships like this then you can use this process of exploring the Freebase data to build MQL queries for those relationships. If you're looking to find any arbitrary connection between any two entities in Freebase then you'll need to download the Freebase Data Dumps and run a shortest path algorithm over the entire graph.

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