Allow additional data

[cosmo0]

Every implementation I've seen of the BCF API has additional data in the responses; it's only natural, since every software has features not found in others that they want to handle.

However, I think it's possible to standardize these infos (at least some of them), so that a client could at least display them, and even allow to dynamically generate a form with values. There's already some semblance of this in the files_information endpoint but I think it's not enough.

Here's a quick example.

Define data

Create a /meta route suffix for some routes: projects, topics, files, comments, documents. I feel these are probably the most likely to have non-standardized informations.

• /bcf/{version}/projects/meta
• /bcf/{version}/projects/{project_id}/topics/meta
• /bcf/{version}/projects/{project_id}/topics/{guid}/files/meta
• /bcf/{version}/projects/{project_id}/topics/{guid}/comments/meta
• /bcf/{version}/projects/{project_id}/documents/meta

These routes would return the following informations:

[
  {
    "code": "X",
    "label": "Label X",
    "id": "f8fab089-e26a-46d1-8a6c-721e4a8435d8",
    "is_mandatory": false,
    "is_modifiable": true,
    "maximum_length": 200,
    "value_type": "String"
  },
  {
    "code": "Y",
    "label": "Label Y",
    "id": "9e203f1b-7881-4cda-8dac-acc706184595",
    "is_mandatory": false,
    "ismodifiable": true,
    "maximum_length": 10,
    "value_type": "List",
    "values": [
      {
        "code": "A",
        "label": "Label A"
      },
      {
        "code": "B",
        "label": "Label B"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Display data

The data defined in the /meta endpoint would be returned in the following way, for instance for a project list /bcf/{version}/projects/:

[{
    "project_id": "F445F4F2-4D02-4B2A-B612-5E456BEF9137",
    "name": "Example project 1",
    "additional_data": [
        { "code": "X", "value": "Lorem ispum" },
        { "code": "Y", "value": "A" }
    ]
}, {
    "project_id": "A233FBB2-3A3B-EFF4-C123-DE22ABC8414",
    "name": "Example project 2",
    "additional_data": [
        { "code": "X", "value": "Donec tortor nisi" },
        { "code": "Y", "value": "B" }
    ]
}]

[pasi-paasiala]

This is a feature that is being introduced in the upcoming version 4. Please take look at the schema here.

[cosmo0]

Yes but it's missing the definition part. Using only standard BCF4 you cannot know if your field is mandatory or readonly, you cannot have a list of possible values... You cannot build a complete user interface.