1 Topic by kbalmer

  • kbalmer
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Topic: List of Designations

I'm trying to use /api/taxonObservations/species to return a list of recorded species with particular designations, supplying a colon-separated list of designations, e.g.:

designation=WACA-SCH1_PART1:WACA-SCH1_PART2:WACA-SCH5:WACA-SCH8:HABREG-SCH2:HABREG-SCH4:HABREG-SCH5:HABDIR-A2:HABDIR-A4:HABDIR-A5

Experiments suggest that the gateway is only paying attention to the first item in the list, so in this case I'm only getting WACA-SCH1_PART1 species returned.

Maybe I have the wrong syntax, but using commas to form the list returns no records at all.

I'm presuming that the gateway supports a list of designations as the documentation says "Any required designations" (plural). I'm also presuming that its an OR function rather than AND, so that I can supply a range of "notable" designations to get back a list of all "interesting" species.

Can anyone please let me know where I'm going wrong?

Thanks, Keith

kbalmer's Website

2 Reply by matt.debont

  • matt.debont
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Re: List of Designations

At present we only support one designation at a time, I can add this to the backlog it should be fairly simple to add, its likely that we would go with a comma separated list i.e. WACA-SCH1_PART1,WACA-SCH1_PART2,WACA-SCH5,...

Thanks for bringing this up, I am not sure when we will manage to get to the doing this right now however so can't really give an ETA right now.

Matt

Matt Debont
Application Developer
Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY, UK

3 Reply by kbalmer

  • kbalmer
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Re: List of Designations

Thanks for the confirmation but this is disappointing. LRCs search for records in a range of designations. Being only able to search for one at a time isn't very helpful as there are 93 designations supported by the gateway.

The old gateway had a designation called "JNCC_COLLATION_OF_TAXON_DESIGNATIONS" which was a useful bundle of designations (though I was never entirely sure of what). If we are only allowed to specify one designation perhaps a similar collation could be provided as an interim measure until a list of designations is supported?

Keith

kbalmer's Website

4 Reply by matt.debont (edited by matt.debont 10-10-2014 09:45:57)

  • matt.debont
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Re: List of Designations

Its possible that we could set up an organisation supplied list to fill this need temporarily, at present however we are still dealing with a failing database server and as such there are few things that wont be working right now, importing and hence adding new designations / organisation supplied lists is one of the things which doesn't work right now. I would get in touch with Graham in so we can see what we can do in the mean time to help out or get this stuff prepared for when we are at 100% again.

Matt

Matt Debont
Application Developer
Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY, UK

5 Reply by charliebarnes

  • charliebarnes
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Re: List of Designations

There is already a "JNCC collation of taxon designations" organisation list... does this fill the need?

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

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6 Reply by Graham French

  • Graham French
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Re: List of Designations

Hello Keith

The JNCC collation of taxon designations organisation list is a list of all the taxa across all the designations on the NBN Gateway, as supplied by JNCC. It is the same as the list on the old Gateway though has since been updated to reflect recent updates to the designations.

As Matt mentioned, once the issue with the database server has been resolved, I can add a new organisation list for the subset of required designations. This list can then be used until the REST services are extended to support more than one designated list at a time.

Best wishes

Graham
NBN Technical Liaison Officer

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7 Reply by kbalmer

  • kbalmer
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Re: List of Designations

Thanks to you all for the suggestions. I hadn't spotted that the REST service supported organisation lists as an alternative approach to this so I just tried including

orgSuppliedList=JNCC_CTD

in the query, however the response was "The requested resource is not available".

I may have done something wrong but haven't spotted what yet... ( I probably will just after hitting submit).

Keith

kbalmer's Website

8 Reply by matt.debont

  • matt.debont
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Re: List of Designations

Hi, the org supplied list resource currently works on ID (1 in this case) rather than the short codes if I remember correctly, a pain I know, but I will try and get these all logically lined up in the future. Please let us know if you have any further problems.

Matt

Matt Debont
Application Developer
Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY, UK

9 Reply by kbalmer

  • kbalmer
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Re: List of Designations

There's nothing like consistency ;-)

The list is actually ID 2 not 1. That seems to work, though I still need to check the species reported against expectations.

I was surprised to see Brimstone butterfly reported but in checking the JNCC spreadsheet of taxon designations this is listed under "Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order (1985)" so I guess this list will raise a few eyebrows if we use it here in Bedfordshire!

Thanks for your help.

Keith

kbalmer's Website

10 Reply by matt.debont

  • matt.debont
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Re: List of Designations

Hi, Yes you are correct, I was looking in the database and grabbed the wrong column, thanks for bringing this up and let me know if there is something else I can do in the meantime.

Matt Debont
Application Developer
Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY, UK