Hi guys,
Following from the recent discussion wrt taverna killing your data
service... One of the issues we have at the moment is that fetching all
the dataset config files takes a while and we have to do it more often
than we'd like. We could cache but at present I don't think there's any
way of knowing whether the cache is valid so it's not a safe thing to do
in general.
Request - add a method to the service API that returns the last
modification date of any dataset config within that mart.
This should be simple enough, and while not too clever I don't think
these things change that fast and we can live with having to refresh
everything if a single file changes. Taverna (and any other clients with
similar behaviour) can then call this very simple (and cheap) method to
decide whether to use a cached copy or refresh and everyone's lives will
be better.
As for format, I don't really care as long as it's parse-able by
sensible languages. Milliseconds from the epoch is the standard date
format for these things and comparing two integers is about as simple as
it gets when checking whether a refresh is required. Note that I don't
want to use version numbers here, a simple timestamp is more than
sufficient.
Cheers,
Tom
- [mart-dev] Request : Addition to biomart service API - allow... Tom Oinn
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