On Sep 10, 2012, at 14:48 , Fischlin Andreas andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch
wrote:
Dear Adam,
Many thanks for this most valuable information. Indeed, in the meantime I got
a confirmation from company Thomson Reuters that they have switched from
version 1.0 to 2.0 of their web services, including the SOAP access as of
31st August 2012.
Well, that's a pretty clear indication of what has happened.
Unfortunately I need very urgently ISI WOS in BibDesk back.
Any idea what could be done?
New WS stub code [1] has to be generated with WSMakeStubs, it has to be checked
for bugs, and then glue code has to be written to integrate the new service
into BibDesk [2]. This last is the only significant task, and based on my
cursory glance last week, it'll be a fairly extensive rewrite.
BDSKISIWebServices.[hm] will be replace entirely, and BDSKISIGroupServer.m will
have to be rewritten to use the new methods and error checking.
[1]
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIWebServices.m?revision=18776view=markup
[2]
http://bibdesk.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bibdesk/trunk/bibdesk/BDSKISIGroupServer.m?revision=18776view=markup
I'd guess 4-8 hours work, assuming the new API is straightforward and not too
different from the old one, but I have very low confidence in those
assumptions, and I have no time to look at this myself before October.
Notably I have for sure following questions for the time being:
1) Where are search details as contained in a .bdsksearch file actually
stored in BibDesk once such a search has been installed?
I have consulted the help pages, and examples of .bdsksearch files are also
not that difficult to construct from scratch. But this all did not answer me
this question. Have I overlooked something or is it really missing.
Those files are largely irrelevant for WoS searches; they just store a database
name and human-readable counterpart. Local additions should end up in
~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/SearchGroupServers.
2) What URL is Searches - Web of Science SCI using?
In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me this
question, but I do not know what to answer.
The default endpoint is
http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve
See link [1] for details.
3) Can I edit or at least see Web of Science SCI search specs at the XML
level?
Is there a way to edit a search once its .bdsksearch file has been installed?
I looked for plist files, but neither inside the application BibDesk nor in
~/Library/Application Support could I find the wanted information.
No. It will require writing Objective-C code. Queries are constructed in
-[BDSKISIGroupServer downloadWithSearchTerm:database:] and passed off to the
generated WS code. The bdsksearch files will not help you at all here, so
forget about them.
4) Can I look at a SOAP protocol during an attempt to access the ISI WOS
service?
In the current case I opened with Thomson Reuters, they are asking me for the
exact error message that was returned, but I can not answer that question
unless I could look at the protocol of a query using SOAP access.
It should be logged to the console, if Apple gives it to us.
Apple's WebServices code is utter crap, to put it mildly. It has longstanding
bugs and feature gaps which have been ignored since it was introduced in 10.2.
Rather than address those problems, Apple has deprecated their WebServicesCore
framework in 10.8, with no replacement that I can find. Typical.
Anyway, this latter point is something to keep in mind when working with Web
Services on the Mac; Apple's framework problems can make things really hard to
debug, so my estimates on time for this could be way off. I used SUDS in
Python for another project this year, and it was so much nicer that it wasn't
even funny. In fact, it would be tempting to look at the feasibility of
bundling that with BibDesk, and writing a separate Python tool to do the WS
search.
--
Adam
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