Page History

...

The DSpace 4.0 REST API (JERSEYJersey) allows for data in DSpace to be re-used by external systems to make new uses of your data. The DSpace 4.0 REST API provides READ-ONLY access via JSON or XML to publicly accessibly Communities, Collections, Items , and Bitstreams. Also, regarding Item metadata, only Only non-hidden item metadata (ie.eg. provenance is hidden by default) is are exposed for an at the Item endpoint. We intend that future DSpace releases will grow and evolve the REST API to support a greater set of features, based on community input and support. This JERSEY Jersey implementation of a REST API for DSpace is not related to other add-on modules providing REST-API support for DSpace, such as GSOC REST API, Wijiti REST API, Hedtek REST API, or SimpleREST. 

Introduction to JERSEY

...

REST

...

Below is some sample JERSEY code of how you wire up resources, choose to serialize to HTML, JSON, or XML. And between display single-entity vs display list-of-entities.

@Path("/collections")
public class CollectionsResource {

    @GET
    @Path("/")
    @Produces(MediaType.TEXT_HTML)
    public String listHTML() {...}

    @GET
    @Path("/")
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
    public org.dspace.rest.common.Collection[] list(@QueryParam("expand") String expand) {...}

    @GET
    @Path("/{collection_id}")
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
    public org.dspace.rest.common.Collection getCollection(@PathParam("collection_id") Integer collection_id, @QueryParam("expand") String expand) {...}

There was no central ProviderRegistry that you have to declare your path. Your free to use @annotations to get your code to respond to requests, and there are helpful parameter helpers to extract parameters into Java variables.

REST Endpoints

We have modeled the DSpace entities of Communities, Collections, Items, and Bitstreams. The API is not a straight database schema dump of these entities, but provides some wrapping that makes it easy to follow relationships in the API output.

...

Bitstream Expands: parent, all

Introduction to Jersey for developers

The REST API for DSpace 4.0 is implemented using Jersey, the reference implementation of the Java standard for building RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS 1, JSR 311). That means this API should be easier to expand and maintain than other API approaches, as this approach has been widely adopted in the industry.

Below is some sample Jersey code of how you wire up resources, choose to serialize to HTML, JSON or XML. And between display single-entity vs. display list-of-entities.

@Path("/collections")
public class CollectionsResource {
    @GET
    @Path("/")
    @Produces(MediaType.TEXT_HTML)
    public String listHTML() {...}


    @GET
    @Path("/")
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
    public org.dspace.rest.common.Collection[] list(@QueryParam("expand") String expand) {...}


    @GET
    @Path("/{collection_id}")
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
    public org.dspace.rest.common.Collection getCollection(@PathParam("collection_id") Integer collection_id, @QueryParam("expand") String expand) {...}

There was no central ProviderRegistry that you have to declare your path. Your free to use @annotations to get your code to respond to requests. There are helpful parameter helpers to extract parameters into Java variables.

Additional Information

Additional information can be found in the README for dspace-rest, and in the GitHub Pull Request for DSpace REST (JERSEYJersey).