Web-Service

cdf: g5natjia

email: nathan.jia@mail.utoronto.ca

Eight RESTful APIs are available for use. The first six can be accessed using HTTP GET requests, while the last two require HTTP POST requests.

Note: the format of published_date would be YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS-MM:SS, where the "T" in the middle stands for time, and minutes and seconds are a range.

GET:

• url: /text-articles;
• return: a list of articles;
• fields: title, abstract, published_date, and short_url.

• url; /authors;
• return: a list of authors;
• field: author;
• note: One author field may contain more than one authors, separated by " And ".

• url: /urls;
• return: a list of urls grouped by published dates;
• fields: published_date, short_urls;
• note: published dates are not sorted.

• url: /tags;
• return: a list of all the tags;
• field: des_facet;
• note: some tags may appear more than once.

• url: /article/ + index;
• return: an article specified by index;
• fields: section, subsection, title, abstract, byline, published_date, des_facet;
• note:
  • index should be a positive interger;
  • null is returned if index is not valid;
  • returned value is enclosed in index 0 of an array, so use [0] to access it

• url: /media-articles;
• if multimedia(images) exist:
  • return: a list of articles with images and url linking to the original article;
  • fields: multimedia, short_url;
    • subfields of multimedia: url, caption, width, height;
  • note: multimedia may contain more than one images;
• else:
  • return: a list of articles with title and url linking to the original article;
  • fields: title, short_url.

POST:

• url: /;
• funcion: allow users to sign up (if the username does not exist) or log in;
• return:
  • "Signed up";
  • "Logged in";
  • "Wrong password";
• note:
  • highly recommend using a form to transfer the information;
  • when setting up the form, the username should have name uname, and the password should have pwd as name;
  • passwords are hashed at server-side using a hash function similar to hashCode() in Java.

• url: /feedback;
• function: allow users to submit feedback regarding this webpage, which will not associated with this user;
• return: none;
• note: only logged in users can submit feedback; this is to prevent spam.