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API Design Guidelines

The following section outlines guidelines related to extending and/or modifying the Galaxy API. The Galaxy API has grown in an ad-hoc fashion over time by many contributors and so clients SHOULD NOT expect the API will conform to these guidelines - but developers contributing to the Galaxy API SHOULD follow these guidelines.

  • API functionality should include docstring documentation for consumption at docs.galaxyproject.org.

  • Developers should familiarize themselves with the HTTP status code definitions http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html. The API responses should properly set the status code according to the result - in particular 2XX responses should be used for successful requests, 4XX for various kinds of client errors, and 5XX for the errors on the server side.

  • If there is an error processing some part of the request (one item in a list for instance), the status code should be set to reflect the error and the partial result may or may not be returned depending on the controller - this behavior should be documented.

  • API methods should throw a finite number of exceptions (defined in galaxy.exceptions) and these should subclass MessageException and not paste/wsgi HTTP exceptions. When possible, the framework itself should be responsible for catching these exceptions, setting the status code, and building an error response.

  • Error responses should not consist of plain text strings - they should be dictionaries describing the error and containing the following:

    {
  "status_code": 400,
  "err_code": 400007,
  "err_msg": "Request contained invalid parameter, action could not be completed.",
  "type": "error",
  "extra_error_info": "Extra information."
}

    Various error conditions (once a format has been chosen and framework to enforce it in place) should be spelled out in this document.

  • Backward compatibility is important and should be maintained when possible. If changing behavior in a non-backward compatible way please ensure one of the following holds - there is a strong reason to believe no consumers depend on a behavior, the behavior is effectively broken, or the API method being modified has not been part of a tagged dist release.

The following bullet points represent good practices more than guidelines, please consider them when modifying the API.

  • Functionality should not be copied and pasted between controllers - consider refactoring functionality into associated classes or short of that into Mixins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance) or into Managers (galaxy.managers).

  • API additions are more permanent changes to Galaxy than many other potential changes and so a second opinion on API changes should be sought.

  • New API functionality should include functional tests. These functional tests should be implemented in Python and placed in lib/galaxy_test/api.

  • Changes to reflect modifications to the API should be pushed upstream to the BioBlend project if possible.

Longer term goals/notes.

  • It would be advantageous to have a clearer separation of anonymous and admin handling functionality.

  • If at some point in the future, functionality needs to be added that breaks backward compatibility in a significant way to a component used by the community - a “dev” variant of the API will be established and the community should be alerted and given a timeframe for when the old behavior will be replaced with the new behavior.

  • Consistent standards for range-based requests, batch requests, filtered requests, etc… should be established and documented here.