Questioning Authority

Code: Gem Version Build Status Coverage Status

Docs: Contribution Guidelines Apache 2.0 License

Community Support: Samvera Community Slack

You should question your authorities.

Table of Contents

Not seeing documentation you used to find in the README?

Much of the documentation has moved to the Questioning Authority wiki to allow for better organization. We hope that you will find this easier to use.

What does this do?

Provides a set of uniform RESTful routes to query any controlled vocabulary or set of authority terms. Results are returned in JSON and can be used within the context of a Rails application or any other Ruby environment. Primary examples would include providing auto-complete functionality via Javascript or populating a dropdown menu with a set of terms.

How does it work?

Authorities are defined as classes, each implementing a set of methods allowing a controller to return results from a given vocabulary in the JSON format. The controller does three things:

  • provide a list of all terms (if allowed by the class)
  • return a set of terms matching a given query
  • return the complete information for a specific term given its identifier

Depending on the kind of authority or its API, the controller may not do all of these things such as return a complete list of terms.

Sub-Authorities

Some authorities, such as Library of Congress, allow sub-authorities which is an additional parameter that further defines the kind of authority to use with the context of a larger one.

How do I use this?

Add the gem to your Gemfile

gem 'qa'

Run bundler

bundle install

Install the gem to your application

rails generate qa:install

This will copy over some additional config files and add the engine's routes to your config/route.rb.

Start questioning your authorities!

Basic QA Requests

These show the basic routing patterns for connecting to authorities. See the Questioning Authority wiki documentation for detailed documentation and examples for each authority and local authorities.

Return a complete list of terms:

/qa/terms/:vocab
/qa/terms/:vocab/:subauthority

Return a set of terms matching a given query

/qa/search/:vocab?q=search_term
/qa/search/:vocab/:subauthority?q=search_term

Return the complete information for a specific term given its identifier

/qa/show/:vocab/:id
/qa/show/:vocab/:subauthority/:id

Typical JSON Results

Results are returned in JSON in this format:

[
    {"id" : "subject_id_1", "label" : "First labels"},
    {"id" : "subject_id_2", "label" : "Printing labels"},
    {"id" : "", "label" : "This term has no id number"},
    {"id" : "", "label" : "Neither does this"}
]

Authority Sources information

See the Questioning Authority wiki for documentation on how to connect to the supported authorities, documentation on how to create new authorities, and other useful tips.

Developer Notes

How to Contribute

To develop this gem, clone the repository, then run:

bundle install
rake ci

This will install the gems, create a dummy application under spec/internal and run the tests. After you've made changes, make sure you've included tests and run the test suite with a new sample application:

rake engine_cart:clean
rake ci

Commit your features into a new branch and submit a pull request.

Contributing

If you're working on PR for this project, create a feature branch off of main.

This repository follows the Samvera Community Code of Conduct and language recommendations. Please do not create a branch called master for this repository or as part of your pull request; the branch will either need to be removed or renamed before it can be considered for inclusion in the code base and history of this repository.

Compatibility

This gem works with Rails 5.0-7.0 and Ruby 2.5-3.1, provided the version of Rails supports the version of Ruby.

See also .circleci/config.yml and spec/test_app_templates/Gemfile.extra.

Product Owner & Maintenance

qa was a Core Component of the Samvera Community. Given a decline in available labor required for maintenance, this project no longer has a dedicated Product Owner. The documentation for what this means can be found here.

Product Owner

Vacant

Until a Product Owner has been identified, we ask that you please direct all requests for support, bug reports, and general questions to the #dev Channel on the Samvera Slack.

Releasing

  1. bundle install
  2. Increase the version number in lib/qa/version.rb
  3. Increase the same version number in .github_changelog_generator
  4. Update CHANGELOG.md by running this command:
  github_changelog_generator --user samvera --project questioning_authority --token YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN_HERE

  1. Commit these changes to the main branch

  2. Run rake release

Help

The Samvera community is here to help. Please see our support guide.

Acknowledgments

This software has been developed by and is brought to you by the Samvera community. Learn more at the Samvera website.

Samvera Logo

Special thanks to...

Jeremy Friesen who gave us the name for our gem.