The goal of etnservice is to to serve data from the European Tracking Network as a restful API.

Etn provides functionality to access data from the European Tracking Network (ETN) database hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) as part of the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch. ETN data is subject to the ETN data policy and can be:

• restricted: under moratorium and only accessible to logged-in data owners/collaborators
• unrestricted: publicly accessible without login and routinely published to international biodiversity facilities

The ETN infrastructure currently requires the package to be run within the LifeWatch.be RStudio server, which is password protected. A login can be requested at https://www.lifewatch.be/etn/contact.

etnservice needs direct access to the ETN database, thus a local install will not function without a copy of this database.

You can install the development version of etnservice from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("inbo/etnservice")

This is a basic example which shows you how adress the API directly:

library(httr) # to talk to the internet
library(magrittr) # to use pipes
library(jsonlite) # to work with JSON files
library(askpass) # to safly enter a password in R

# To access the ETN database, we need a login (username + password). We'll ask
# for the password dynamically because that's safer than storing it as an object
username <- "<your username here!>"
# All functions can be adressed directly in the URL
endpoint <- "https://opencpu.lifewatch.be/library/etn/R/list_animal_ids"
# Request the result of the function to be a json, and put in a request
response <-
    httr::POST(paste(endpoint, "json", sep = "/"),
      body = list(
        credentials = glue::glue('list(username = "{username}", password = "{askpass::askpass()}")')
      )
    )
# Take the response of the server, and convert it into an R object we can use
response %>%
    httr::content(as = "text", encoding = "UTF-8") %>%
    jsonlite::fromJSON(simplifyVector = TRUE)

However, a fork of the etn package is currently in development that will allow you to do this using built in functions.

Another example of the same request as above, but now using curl:

#! /bin/bash
curl --location --request POST 'https://opencpu.lifewatch.be/library/etnservice/R/list_animal_ids/json' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Cookie: vliz_webc=vliz_webc2' \
--data-raw '{
    "credentials": {
        "username": "<your username>",
        "password": "<your password>"
    }
}'