REST and role models

In this posting I want to discuss the new role-based REST service in Pyrrho v4.5. For simplicity we will continue to use the example database from the last two postings, with the following additional steps. These create a new role "Web" with read-only access to the tables, and some metadata for XML formatting of the output. The details are given at the end of this article.
For now let’s just consider GET actions. (As we will see in the next posting, one simple way of handling moderate security for PUT, DELETE and POST is to grant Insert, Update and Delete to a role with a hard-to-guess name.)
We can use REST to explore the Web role of the database:

For the Author table, AUTHOR has been declared as an entity, and ID has been declared as an attribute, so the output has a different form:

We can select by a primary key value

We can limit the output to particular columns:

We can select rows satisfying a particular set of conditions:

We can navigate foreign keys:

We can reverse-navigate foreign keys using the OF keyword (see below)

The syntax here is
http://host:port/database/role{/Selector|/Processing}
Selector matches
[table ]Table_id
[procedure ]Procedure_id
[where ]Column_id=string
[select ]Column_id{,Column_id}
[key ]string
[of ]Table_id[(Column_id{, Column_id})]
Appending another selector is used to restrict a list of data to match a given primary key value or named column values, or to navigate to another list by following a foreign key, or supply the current result as the parameters of a named procedure. The of option is used for reverse navigation of foreign keys, or to traverse many-many relationships.
Processing matches:
distinct [Column_id{, Column_id}]
ascending Column_id{, Column_id}
descending Column_id{, Column_id}
skip Int_string
count Int_string
The relationship of this Library database to the one in the last posting is (approximately) as follows:
In role Library:
Create role “Web”
Grant select on author to “Web”
Grant select on book to “Web”
Insert into book(title,aid) values(‘Great Expectations’,1)
In role “Web”:
Alter table author entity
Alter table author alter id attribute