osfclient

osfclient Evaluation

Purpose

Evaluate osfclient for adaptation into PresQT. ‘We’ in this document means The Center for Research Computing at The University of Notre Dame.

Python Library

• The Python Library is definitely useful for navigating the OSF API.

  • Possibly useful for writing files to OSF and downloading files from OSF.

• It currently uses Username/Password to login.

  • This can be updated to use tokens which we prefer.

    • This change should be relatively straight forward.

• There is the possibility that there are significant additions/changes that need to be added to the codebase to adapt it to PresQT.

Command Line Interface

The CLI functionality of OSFClient can not be taken advantage of for PresQT. PresQT does not offer a command line for the CRC to use any of the functions. Of course, the CRC can borrow code and methodologies.

Questions/Concerns

• Is anyone managing osfclient?

  • Will the process of making pull requests be lengthy/tedious/difficult?

  • Will it be easier to for a local copy and the osfclient can review our changes and decide what they want to adopt later?

  • Will we be in charge of writing documentation for changes we make? Will osfclient owners do this?

• If later on this adaptation doesn’t work then we would need to write our own functionality and this could set us back weeks/months.

• osfclient does not provide data in the format that we want it. And ultimately this format is non-negotiable since our PresQT API payloads need to be static to play well with other vendors.

  • We can write functions that transform it to suit out API payload desires but we’d rather write the original functions to return what we need.

Conclusion

• We will pull code from osfclient as a basis for our OSF integration into PresQT.

• We don’t feel that contributing to osfclient is feasible while meeting the current project demands.

• We also won’t be forking the osf integration because the end result might not look much like the original osfclient project so there is no need.

• However osfclient has given us a wonderful starting place and will be extremely useful in our integration of OSF to PresQT.