Best Practices

General Concepts

The BrAPI Community has developed a set of Best Practices when working with BrAPI implementations.

• Alternative Standards - Notes on conversions and mappings to other existing standards including MIAPPE, ICASA, MCPD, GeoJSON, and GA4GH Variants Schema

• Authentication - Notes on Authentication and Authorization, focusing on OAuth2

• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) - Notes on common CORS errors and how to deal with them

• Required and Additional Fields - Notes on Fields and Parameters when they are Required, Added, and Deprecated

• RESTfulness - General REST best practices, including notes on HTTP verbs, HTTP status codes, and URL construction.

• Versioning - Notes on BrAPI Versioning Scheme

Implementation Notes

These are notes on how to correctly implement certain specific concepts in BrAPI.

• Dates and Times - Notes on encoding Dates and Times

• Object Identifiers - Notes on DbIds, Names, PUIs, DOIs, and External References

• Error Handling - Notes on handling Errors

• Location Coordinates - Notes on use GPS Coordinates and GeoJSON

• Observation Levels - Notes on how to represent different types of Observation Units (ie, field, plot, plant, etc)

• Pagination - Notes on Pagination

• Pedigree Tree Implementation - Guidelines for implementing a Pedigree Tree in BrAPI

• Search Services - Notes on Search implementations