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SRU(3pm)

NAME

   SRU - Search and Retrieval by URL

SYNOPSIS

       ## a simple CGI example

       use SRU::Request;
       use SRU::Response;

       ## create CGI object
       my $cgi = CGI->new();

       ## create a SRU request object from the CGI object
       my $request = SRU::Request->newFromCGI( $cgi );

       ## create a SRU response based from the request
       my $response = SRU::Response->newFromRequest( $request );

       if ( $response->type() eq 'explain' ) {
           ...
       } elsif ( $response->type() eq 'scan' ) {
           ...
       } elsif ( $response->type() eq 'searchRetrieve' ) {
           ...
       }

       ## print out the response
       print $cgi->header( -type => 'text/xml' );
       print $response->asXML();

DESCRIPTION

   The SRU package provides a framework for working with the Search and
   Retrieval by URL (SRU) protocol developed by the Library of Congress.
   SRU defines a web service for searching databases containing metadata
   and objects. SRU often goes under the name SRW which is a SOAP version
   of the protocol. You can think of SRU as a RESTful version of SRW,
   since all the requests are simple URLs instead of XML documents being
   sent via some sort of transport layer.

   You might be interested in SRU if you want to provide a generic API for
   searching a data repository and a mechanism for returning metadata
   records.  SRU defines three verbs: explain, scan and searchRetrieve
   which define the requests and responses in a SRU interaction.

   This set of modules attempts to provide a framework for building an SRU
   service. The distribution is made up of two sets of Perl modules:
   modules in the SRU::Request::* namespace which represent the three
   types of requests; and modules in the SRU::Response::* namespace which
   represent the various responses.

   Typical usage is that a request object is created using a factory
   method in the SRU::Request module. The factory is given either a URI or
   a CGI object for the HTTP request. SRU::Request will look at the URI
   and build the appropriate request object: SRU::Request::Explain,
   SRU::Request::Scan or SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve.

   Once you've got a request object you can build a response object by
   using the factory method newFromRequest() in SRU::Request. This method
   will examine the request and build the corresponding result object
   which you can then populate with result data appropriately. When you
   are finished populating the response object with results you can call
   asXML() on it to get the full XML for your response.

   To understand the meaning of the various requests and their responses
   you'll want to read the docs at the Library of Congress. A good place
   to start is this simple introductory page:
   http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/simple.html For more information about
   working with the various request and response objects in this
   distribution see the POD in the individual packages:

   *   SRU::Request

   *   SRU::Request::Explain

   *   SRU::Request::Scan

   *   SRU::Request::SearchRetrieve

   *   SRU::Response

   *   SRU::Response::Explain

   *   SRU::Response::Scan

   *   SRU::Response::SearchRetrieve

   *   SRU::Server

   Questions and comments are more than welcome. This software was
   developed as part of a National Science Foundation grant for building
   distributed library systems in the Ockham Project. More about Ockham
   can be found at http://www.ockham.org.

DEPENDENCIES

   To use SRU::Server and Catalyst::Controller::SRU, one must install
   CGI::Application and Catalyst, respectively. In a future release
   Catalyst::Controller::SRU might be moved to an independent module.

TODO

   *   create a client (SRU::Client)

   *   allow searchRetrieve responses to be retrieved as RSS

   *   make sure SRU::Server can function like real-world SRU interfaces

   *   handle CQL parsing errors

   *   better argument checking in response constructors

AUTHORS

   Ed Summers <[email protected]>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

   This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Ed Summers.

   This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
   the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.



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