Metis data management GUI: Backend for Frontend

Metis is an open scientific framework, materials data organizer, and collaborative online platform for the nanotechnology research. It was designed for the offline physical and online virtual autonomous laboratories dealing with the materials science. Metis is an AI-ready solution, aiming to bring the recent advances of computer science into a rather conservative area of new materials development and quality control. Metis currently focuses on the X-ray powder diffraction and atomistic simulations. Its development was started in 2021 in BASF (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany) by Bernd Hinrichsen and Evgeny Blokhin.

This is the second part of the whole Metis infra: GUI ⇄ BFF ⇄ backend.

Whereas the scientific features of Metis are handled with its backend, this BFF provides user and access management, as well as the backend proxy. The scientific data are represented by the abstract datasource objects, managed by GUI users or scripted clients via the standard application programming interface (API).

Requirements

node -v >= 15
npm -v >= 7
Postgres (any relatively new)

NB to upgrade node you may run npm install -g n && n lts and re-start the shell.

Installation

cp conf/env.ini.sample conf/env.ini
npm install
npm run db-migrate
npm run db-seed

Running

For development mode run the following command:

npm run dev

For production mode run the following command:

npm run start

Configure the development and production settings in conf/env.ini file.

Technical details

BFF database schema

The BFF database schema is presented above (see db/migrations script).

By design, BFF knows very little about the scientific data and is only responsible for the users and access management.

On top of the users, the main concepts mapped onto the database are:

datasources (static data sent to the backend)
calculations (transitions of data into the other data)
collections (groups of the data)

Proxying

Note, that the non-versioned routes without /v0 will be redirected as is to the backend.

API

The docs are generated with the apidoc:

npm run apidoc

and, optionally, swagger:

npm run apidoc-swagger

Also, there is the Python API client metis-client (on PyPI) consuming all the public Metis API methods.

License

BSD 3-Clause

basf / metis-bff

readme