The Research Data Connector App is a re-implementation of the ScieboRDS app. It allows Own Cloud users to connect to research data repositories to upload their data to these repositories easily.

The SURF Research Data Connector app is setup as a Flask app.

It can use flask migrate and a SQLite for user history data storage for local development. In production a MariaDB is used. You could also use Postgres if you want.

Flask sessions are used for temporary storage of variables like a.o. tokens and Research Drive (Owncloud) application passwords.

The library pyocclient (https://pypi.org/project/pyocclient/) is used for connecting the app to Owncloud using the webdav protocol.

We can only login to Owncloud webdav using an application password.

Connecting to webdav using bearer tokens is not supported yet:

https://central.owncloud.org/t/how-to-authenticate-to-the-webdav-api/40049

The app uses Datahugger to get open data.

• Figshare - OK
• Zenodo - OK
• Dryad - OK
• OSF - OK
• Dataverse - OK
• Mendeley - OK
• DataOne - OK, but only the ones with DOI, as it looks for view/doi:(.*) in the url. There are many implementations with view/urn:uuid:. We could implement a solution in a fork of datahugger for those as well.
• Github - OK, but it specifically will download only master.zip downloads. We can update the datahugger code to improve on this.
• Hugging face - Not OK

We can embed the SRC app as an external app.

To do so we need to enable the following Owncloud Plugins:

• External sites
• OAuth2

Go to Settings > Admin > Additional > External Sites

Add the name and url of the external app and select an icon.

This will add the icon and the name with link to the menu.

The app will be embedded here: /index.php/apps/external/1

Add the url to the env vars as EMBED_APP_URL.

Example:

EMBED_APP_URL: https://aperture.data.surfsara.nl/index.php/apps/external/1

Fill out the variables in the env.ini.

Everything needed for a local setup of the app is located in the ./local folder.

The setup can be done on a minikube cluster. More info on minikube can be found here: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ First install minikube on your system. On linux you can run the minikube.sh script, but you do need to customize it to match your setup.

To run the app simply as a local flask app run:

flask --app run run

If you go to https://127.0.0.1:5000/ the app will open the home page and try to automatically connect using Oauth2. If this is not setup (yet) you can go to https://127.0.0.1:5000/connect and connect using an app password.

The app reads all the config variables from the env.ini file. Make sure that you set all the LOCAL_XXX variables to match your local app.

The app will try to find a sql database if you have this setup in the config. If a database connection cannot be initiated the app will try to use a local sqlite database. To create the sqlite database run:

flask db init
flask db upgrade

• Complete deployment instructions