Introduction

The curator Database style interacts with an instance of the Materials Database Curation System (MDCS). Records are stored in the MDCS instance as validated XML.

Style requirements

  • Access to a working 1.X MDCS instance.
  • The included mdcs.py file, which uses Python to define REST interactions with a database.

Initialization arguments:

  • host: the URL for accessing the MDCS instance.
  • user: the username to use to access the MDCS instance.
  • pswd: the corresponding password for user, or path to a file containing the password.
  • cert: the directory path to a web certification file, if required by the MDCS instance.

Additional notes:

  • With this method, a remote MDCS instance can be accessed by multiple computing resources.
  • Adding records to an MDCS instance requires a valid XSD schema for each record style, and that each corresponding XML record be consistent with that schema.
  • There are no functions for update_tar and delete_tar as the current versions of MDCS do not allow the associated files to be deleted.