ARTK

A rails engine for Archivists' Toolkit

Provides a minimal RESTful interface to some of the tables in the Archivist's Toolkit database

You can access finding aids, their components and accessions via URLs such as

/artk/resources

which returns a list of all finding aids, something like

[[{"ARC-0030":"Terry Stewart Collection"},{"ARC-0001":"Art Collins Papers"},{"ARC-0003":"Milt Gabler Papers"}]

or you can access a single finding aid in the Resources table by using

/artk/resources/ARC-0001

which will return json for the ARC-0001 record in the Resources table of the AT database. You may also get a listing of all the non-item level components of a finding aid by going to

/artk/resources/ARC-0001/components

which will return something like

[{"ref1":"Series I: Iggy Pop [RESTRICTED]"},{"ref4":"Series II: Marianne Faithfull [RESTRICTED]"}]

or an identifier and title for each component in the collection.

Add the gem to your Rails gemfile

gem 'artk'

And then add the engine to your application

mount Artk::Engine => '/artk'

Configure the gem to connect to your Archivists' Toolkit database by editing config/database.yml and adding these lines:

artk_development:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: atk
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: password 
  host: localhost

artk_test:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: bl_test
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: password
  host: localhost

artk_production:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: bl_prod
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: password
  host: localhost

The above configuration is for Mysql, so your adapater may vary, and you'll need to change these username, password, and host values to match your environment. Using this configuration allows you to keep your databases separate. For example, the Rails database for your application would be defined by the developement yaml value, while the Archivists' Toolkit database by the artk_development yaml value, and so forth with the other environments.

To be safe, you might want to use a username for the Toolkit connection that has only SELECT rights, and avoid any possibility of the Rails application trying to make changes to the wrong database.

This was written to meet our own local needs, but I welcome patches, feature requests, etc. At the moment, testing is based on our own AT database, which prevents continuous integration testing. Please submit issues as you see fit.

• Use test that don't require a local AT install
• Sanitize query parameters
• Better searching

(c) 2013 Adam Wead