Webinar: Database Planning, Structure & Sharing in Specify

[Grant]

Hi @jagullov,

Thanks for your question! We have our guide on how to use the Specify 7 API here:

How to use the Specify 7 API

This is a simple introduction to accessing the Specify API using the curl command line utility. For legibility, JSON output is piped through a pretty-printer provided by the Python json library. It is hoped that these examples illustrate how the API could be utilized by any environment which supports HTTP and JSON. These examples illustrate use with a demo server on localhost. Substitute an appropriate hostname as necessary. Swagger UI API Pages Within every instance of Specify 7, there i…

There is a section named Filtering which explains a bit more about this

@Grant

Filtering

Often it will be necessary to retrieve a collection of resources that meet certain criteria. The API implements basic filtering for this purpose. E.g. to retrieve all preparation records for CollectionObject with ID 12:

curl -b cookies.txt http://localhost:8000/api/specify/preparation/?collectionobject=12 \
    | python -m json.tool

Collection requests can also be filtered by domain, which means that only records which are in the same collection context as the user will be returned.

curl -b cookies.txt http://localhost:8000/api/specify/taxon/?domainfilter=true \
    | python -m json.tool

Effectively, if you do not add the ?domainfilter=true parameter to the API call, it will return records from all collections in the database. You can create scripts to find records from all collections that have preparations at a particular storage location (e.g. f"{BASE_URL}/api/specify/preparation/?storage={StorageID}"") or find all objects that have a locality at a particular level in the geography tree. It takes a bit of technical knowledge to accomplish, but it is completely doable!