Exercise 1: Exploring Endpoints with HAL Browser

1. Open the HAL Browser landing page

https://dspace7.4science.cloud/dspace-spring-rest

• Note the list of endpoints that are available

2. Communities and Collections

Use the HAL Browser to explore the community and collection endpoints.

2a. List all Communities

Use the HAL Browser to list all communities.

api/core/communities

• Note that the results are paginated.
• Navigate through the list using the first, last, and next links.
• How many items are in the repository?
• How many pages of items are available?
  • Note: The DSpace 7 REST API will use the same approach for paginating all lists of objects.

Note the search operation that exists.

2b. Search for all top level communities

Use the HAL Browser to list all top level communities.

api/core/communities/search/top

2c. Expand the embedded community resources

In the “Embedded Resources” section, expand a specific top level community

• What is its name?
• What is its handle?
• What is its unique id?
• Note the links that are available in the embedded Resources.
• Click the “self” link to retrieve the object on its own.

2d. Request a specific community

After retrieving a specific community…

api/core/communities/[uuid]

Explore the community

• Does the community have subcommunities?
• Does the community contain collections?
• If not, navigate the subcommunity hierarchy until you are able to retrieve a specific collection.

2e. Request Collections within a subcommunity

Use the HAL Browser to navigate to a subcommunity that contains collections. List those collections. api/core/communities/[uuid]/collections

2f. Expand an embedded collection resource

Expand a collection in the embedded resources section of the HAL Browser to look at its data.

• What is its name?

3. Browse the Items

An anonymous user can only browse public items. Access to the

api/core/items

endpoint is restricted to administrator. Try! you will get a Forbidden 403 response

3a. List all the browses

Use the HAL Browser to list all the available browses index in the repository.

• How many browses are defined?
• Explore the embedded definition and identify the browse by title and the browse by authors, do you see any difference in the exposed links?

3a. Browse items by title

Use the HAL Browser to browse the public items in the repository by title.

• Note that the results are paginated.
• How many items are in the repository?
• How many pages of items are available?

api/discover/browses/title/items

3b. Browse the authors

Use the HAL Browser to browse the repository author index.

• Note that the results are paginated.
• How many authors are in the repository?
• How many items has the first author?

api/discover/browses/author/entries

3c. Browse the items by author

Use the HAL Browser to browse the items for a specific author.

• Note that the results are paginated.

api/discover/browses/author/entries/[value]/items

4. View the details of an item

4a. View a specific item

Use the HAL Browser to view the details of a specific item, use the self link to access directly the item. Note how the URL is changed

api/core/items/[uuid]

4b. View the owning collection for an item

Use the HAL Browser to view the owning collection for a specific item.

api/core/items/[uuid]/owningCollection

4c. View the bitstreams for an item

Use the HAL Browser to view the bitstreams for a specific item.

api/core/items/[uuid]/bitstreams