[ome-devel] Shoola-back-end consistency issues

[Ilya Goldberg]

On Jul 7, 2005, at 11:18 AM, Josh Moore wrote:

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> Ilya Goldberg wrote:
>
>> This sounds interesting. Let's finally get around to some use cases.   
>> For
>>  _what_ do you want to get the SessionKey and mex_id? I was assuming
>> something along the lines of:
>>
>>  getSpotsAsCSV(int imageId);
>>
>>> Well, this kind of call would need a VBA library if you want to issue
>>> it from Excel.  The URL above can be pasted into a Web Query and
>>> doesn't need VBA.  Excel doesn't implement cookies (at least not in  
>>> my
>>> version), so some other way to exchange session tokens has to exist.
>>> You can do several queries to get a SessionKey (by doing a POST query
>>> with typed-in parameters for username/password), then get mex_id,  
>>> etc.
>>> Remember versioning?  What version of the image's spots are you  
>>> after?
>>> That's why you need the mex_id.
>
> Alright. Basically you want a REST web service on top of whatever  
> server
> architecture we have. The VBA library to do the above would just have:
>
> def getSpotsAsCSV(int imageId){
>
> KEY=get("http://blah.blah/getSessionKey?username=&password=") (or POST)
> MEX=get("http://blah.blah/getLatestMexForImageId? 
> imageId=imageId&key=KEY")
> SHEET=get("http://blah.blah/getSpotAsCSV?imagedId=imageId&mex=MEX")
> setSheet(SHEET)
>
> }
>
> Super. We have a plan for making VBA/Excel work. That makes us cool.
> Having a REST API sit on top of something else isn't hard. Otherway
> around sucks.

Sounds good...
And this is supposed to work on all the Office platforms or is it a  
Windows thing only?
Its OK if its Windows only.  Like you said, we don't have to be  
everything to everybody, but its good to give 'er the old college try.


>>> I don't know what I want in the API.  I'm pretending to be Joe-user
>>> over here.  I know how to use Excel.  I probably don't know squat  
>>> about
>>> VBA or APIs or anything of the sort.  I want my Find spots data in
>>> Excel, simple as that.  By any means necessary.
>
> Then on top of the VBA we have an excel function. Imagine a little "="
> bar up top. User types "=getSpots(A12,NameOfTargetSheet)". Spots  
> imported!

OMG!  I'm delirious.