behaviour of find_trees with ottTaxonName

OpenTreeOfLife / otindex

opentree index using postgres and pyramid

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behaviour of find_trees with ottTaxonName #42

Open kcranston opened 7 years ago

kcranston commented 7 years ago

What should happen in these two cases:

there are multiple ottIDs that match the taxon name (could return additional field with other matching name / ids, or a boolean multiple_matches field)
there is no ID that matches the taxon name

josephwb commented 7 years ago

For ottId a bad id returns:

{"matched_studies": []}

So a bad name should do the same. Or update both to be more explicit.

kcranston commented 7 years ago

Simply returning an empty list doesn't differentiate between "there are no trees for this taxon" and "this taxon does not exist". If that distinction is useful, then we should probably return a 400 for the latter case.

Still open question about what to do in cases where the name matches multiple IDs. Is that an error, too?