[Archivesspace_Users_Group] help with API route for archival object notes

[Chris Mayo]

Hi Karen,

To be a little more specific, I'm getting the sense (since I've struggled
with needing to update some notes but not others as well) that what you're
asking is how to create the path to a specific note when you don't know in
advance which note it's going to be.

If you want to only modify notes that have html tags in them, you'll need
to give it the path to ['notes'] part of the structure, and then run a
for-loop, since that part is a list. You can ask it to look at each note in
the list of notes and only make changes if it comes across one of the bad
tags you're looking for. In python this would look something like

for note in json['notes']
    if 'bad tag' in note:
        modify the note

I'm afraid that I am enough of a scripter to only use Python to interact
with the API, if you're using Postman or anything like that I'm not
entirely sure how you'd accomplish something like this, and maybe somebody
else can advise.

The thing that was hardest for me about learning how to interact with JSON
was coming to realize that as far as the scripting language is concerned,
anything inside square brackets [ ] is a list, and anything inside curly
braces { } is a dictionary, and they can be interacted with as those data
types.

Hope that helps, and sorry if I misread what your problem was!
Chris

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 7:35 PM James Bullen <james at hudmol.com> wrote:

>
> Hi Karen,
>
> The general rule is that anything you can GET from a uri can be modified
> and POSTed back to update it.
>
> So, GET the JSON for the archival_object as you are doing. Then modify the
> JSON (in this case the notes bit of it) to look how you want. Then POST it
> back to the same uri.
>
> Notes are nested subrecords (as are dates and others). These don’t have a
> life of their own, they are really just repeating parts of the top level
> record that they are contained within.
>
> Hope that helps..
>
>
> Cheers,
> James
>
>
> On Jul 1, 2020, at 8:22 AM, Karen Miller <k-miller3 at northwestern.edu>
> wrote:
>
> Good morning, ArchivesSpace users.
>
> I am a cataloger (*not* a developer) using the API to update
> ArchivesSpace. So far I’ve figured out how to add LCCNs to the authority_Id
> of Agent records and do a couple more updates that, in retrospect, were
> pretty simple.
>
> The next task I’d like to tackle, however, just seems like maybe it can’t
> be done. We’ve got a lot of notes with html tags in them and I would like
> to update those to valid tags. I can get the JSON for the notes in any
> particular archival object, but I don’t know how to specify the route to
> the note to change it. The JSON looks like this:
>
> 'notes': [{'content': ['This is a note with a bad <i>tag</i>'],
>             'jsonmodel_type': 'note_singlepart',
>             'persistent_id': '75ba0ec57e374b8b154551a69b4c311f',
>             'publish': True,
>             'type': 'abstract'},
>            {'jsonmodel_type': 'note_multipart',
>             'persistent_id': '66afa07b3214260078123236bbe1ff27',
>             'publish': True,
>             'subnotes': [{'content': 'This is a dippy note.',
>                           'jsonmodel_type': 'note_text',
>                           'publish': True}],
>             'type': 'scopecontent'}],
>
> I got this using the route ‘repositories/10/archival_objects/489763’, but
> I don’t know how to specify the note that I want in the JSON. For the agent
> authority_id I used the route ‘‘/agents/people/<somenumber> and specified
> the field like this:
>
> ['names'][0]['authority_id']
>
> I’m hoping this is an easy question for somebody with more experience with
> the API and (especially) with JSON than I. I’m a little afraid the answer
> is that it can’t be done. Any advice will be appreciated!
>
> Karen
>
> *Karen D. Miller*
> Monographic Cataloger/Metadata Specialist
> Northwestern University Libraries
> Northwestern University
> 1970 Campus Drive
> Evanston, IL 60208
> www.library.northwestern.edu
> k-miller3 at northwestern.edu
> 874.467.3462
>
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-- 
Chris Mayo
Digital Production Librarian
Boston College
chris.mayo at bc.edu
pronouns: they/them/theirs
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