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Retrieval by URL (SRU) protocol developed by the Library of Congress. Approved by: tobez (implicit)
56 lines
2.7 KiB
Text
56 lines
2.7 KiB
Text
The SRU package provides a framework for working with the Search and
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Retrieval by URL (SRU) protocol developed by the Library of Congress. SRU
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defines a web service for searching databases containing metadata and
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objects. SRU often goes under the name SRW which is a SOAP version of the
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protocol. You can think of SRU as a RESTful version of SRW, since all the
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requests are simple URLs instead of XML documents being sent via some sort
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of transport layer.
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You might be interested in SRU if you want to provide a generic API for
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searching a data repository and a mechanism for returning metadata
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records. SRU defines three verbs: explain, scan and searchRetrieve which
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define the requests and responses in a SRU interaction.
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This set of modules attempts to provide a framework for building an SRU
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service. The distribution is made up of two sets of Perl modules: modules
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in the SRU::Request::* namespace which represent the three types of
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requests; and modules in the SRU::Response::* namespace which represent
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the various responses.
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Typical usage is that a request object is created using a factory method
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in the SRU::Request module. The factory is given either a URI or a CGI
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object for the HTTP request. SRU::Request will look at the URI and build
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the appropriate request object: SRU::Request::Explain, SRU::Request::Scan
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or SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve.
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Once you've got a request object you can build a response object by using
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the factory method newFromRequest() in SRU::Request. This method will
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examine the request and build the corresponding result object which you
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can then populate with result data appropriately. When you are finished
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populating the response object with results you can call asXML() on it to
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get the full XML for your response.
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To understand the meaning of the various requests and their responses
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you'll want to read the docs at the Library of Congress. A good place to
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start is SRW/U In Five Hundred Words
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http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/brief.html For more information
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about working with the various request and response objects in this
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distribution see the POD in the individual packages:
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* SRU::Request
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* SRU::Request::Explain
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* SRU::Request::Scan
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* SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve
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* SRU::Response
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* SRU::Response::Explain
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* SRU::Response::Scan
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* SRU::Response::SearchRetrieve
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* SRU::Server
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Questions and comments are more than welcome. This software was developed
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as part of a National Science Foundation grant for building distributed
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library systems in the Ockham Project. More about Ockham can be found at
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http://www.ockham.org.
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WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU
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Author: Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>
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