any'ness of id's - how to use it in a generic client

[lathoub]

Hi,

I'm making a generic JavaScript client for the OGC SensorThings API and stumbled on the any'ness of id (as per spec).

The USGS service has alphanumeric id's and the GET for Things is https://labs.waterdata.usgs.gov/sta/v1.1/Things('USGS-09213700')
The BGS service uses numeric id's and the GET looks like this: https://sensors.bgs.ac.uk/FROST-Server/v1.1/Things(10).

A quoted call to https://sensors.bgs.ac.uk/FROST-Server/v1.1/Things('10') results in a 404 Not a valid id (similar for an unquoted call to the USGS service).

Question: What is a good way to deal with this? Especially for a generic client that does not know if id are numeric or alphanumeric.
A numeric test (isNaN) in the client? (What is a service has both numeric and alphanumeric id's in the same table?)

Thanks!
Lathoub

[hylkevds]

You can't have different IDs in the same table / entity type, they're either a Number or a String.

FROST Client (java) does indeed test if the JSON entity in the parse tree is a number or not:

https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FROST-Client/blob/cc8508e1108743412261a5bf069f8593624a5747/src/main/java/de/fraunhofer/iosb/ilt/sta/jackson/IdDeserializer.java#L35-L39

        JsonNode node = parser.getCodec().readTree(parser);
        if (node.isNumber()) {
            return new IdLong(node.asLong());
        }
        return new IdString(node.asText());

The different implementations of the {ID interface](https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FROST-Client/blob/cc8508e1108743412261a5bf069f8593624a5747/src/main/java/de/fraunhofer/iosb/ilt/sta/model/Id.java) know how to output these IDs in URLs and JSON, though the getUrl() and getJson() methods.

[lathoub]

thanks @hylkevds . Solved!

https://github.com/lathoub/UISTA/blob/1458fbeaf03dc8188a31faf544bcb21b22277cad/resources/static/js/map.js#L35-L37

[hylkevds]

Cool that you're making a generic JavaScript client!
The in-development version 2 of FROST-Server can have different ID types per-table, so you could have Things with UUIDs and Observations with Long IDs.

[lathoub]

My client will be read-only, focusing on browsing and comparing multiple datastreams