Conventions Used In This Reference

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The following conventions are used in this reference documentation for clarity and compactness.

 

Server Path References

 

Path references are shown from the Web3 service root. For example, if Web3 is installed at http://www.example.com/web3 then the path /topicmaps would map to http://www.example.com/web3/topicmaps.

 

Server Path Variables

 

Path references that contain item-specific information such as item IDs show these path components surrounded in curly braces. e.g. /topicmaps/{tm}. The path component in curly braces would be replaced in a real URI by the identifier of a Web3 item.

 

Representation Variables

 

Item-specific information in the representation documentation is represented surrounded by % characters. e.g. %association resource uri%. Some values have a special meaning:

 

•%boolean% means a value that can be replaced by a valid boolean value. For JSON, this means either true or false. For XML it means true, false, 0 or 1.
•%date/time% means that the value will be formatted as a representation-specific date/time value. For JSON this means a Javascript Date object. For XML this means a date/time string in sortable YYYY-MM-DD:HH:mm:ss format.
•A series of values separated by pipe (|) characters means that any one of the values is valid. e.g. %Created|Queued% means that either the value Created or the value Queued is allowed.

 

Nested Representations

 

Many representations contain other nested representations. For the XML serialization, the outer element of the representation for a nested object may have a different name from the standard representation for that object type. This is shown by showing the name of the outer element and then in the element content including a link to the nested object representation definition. For example

 

<Association>

  <Type ...>See TopicRef</Type>

</Association>

 

Means that the <Association> element will contain an element whose name is <Type> but whose attributes and content are defined by the TopicRef representation description.

 

For JSON objects a property value that references another type or list of types will be shown as either "instance of (reference to type)" or "array of (reference to type)".