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Restrict globbing to /*
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Closes #147.
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RubenVerborgh committed Mar 26, 2019
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Expand Up @@ -58,80 +58,53 @@ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
<http://www.w3.org/ns/posix/stat#size> "780" .
```

#### Globbing (inlining on GET)
#### Globbing (concatenate RDF files in a container on GET)

We have found that in some cases, using the existing LDP features was not
enough. For instance, to optimize certain applications we needed to aggregate
all RDF resources from a container and retrieve them with a single GET
operation. We implemented this feature on the servers and decided to call it
"globbing". Similar to [UNIX shell
glob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)), doing a GET on any URI
which ends with a `*` will return an aggregate view of all the resources that
match the indicated pattern.
To optimize certain applications,
you can aggregate all RDF resources within a container
and retrieve them with a single `GET` operation.
We refer to this feature as _globbing_,
since it provides a subset of the functionality
offered by the [UNIX shell glob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)).
Performing a `GET` on a URL ending in `/*`
will return an aggregate view of all RDF resources of the corresponding container.

For example, let's assume that `/data/res1` and `/data/res2` are two resources
containing one triple each, which defines their type as follows:
For example, consider a container `/data` that contains the following files:
- `file1.ttl`
- `file2.ttl`
- `res3.txt`

For *res1*:
Let's assume that `/data/file1.ttl` and `/data/file2.ttl`
contain one triple each:

```ttl
<> a <https://example.org/ns/type#One> .
```

For *res2*:

```ttl
<> a <https://example.org/ns/type#Two> .
```

If one would like to fetch all resources of a container beginning with `res`
(e.g. `/data/res1`, `/data/res2`) in one request, they could do a GET on
`/data/res*` as follows.

REQUEST:

```http
GET /data/res* HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
```

RESPONSE:

```http
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
```
```ttl
<res1>
a <https://example.org/ns/type#One> .
<res2>
a <https://example.org/ns/type#Two> .
```

Alternatively, one could ask the server to inline *all* resources of a
container, which includes the triples corresponding to the container itself:

REQUEST:
Then a request to `/data/*`
will return the union of the datasets in `file1.ttl` and `file2.ttl`:

```http
GET /data/* HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
```

RESPONSE:

```http
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
```
```ttl
<>
a <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#BasicContainer> ;
<http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#contains> <res1>, <res2> .
<http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#contains> <file1.ttl>, <file2.ttl> .
<res1>
<file1.ttl>
a <https://example.org/ns/type#One> .
<res2>
<file2.ttl>
a <https://example.org/ns/type#Two> .
```

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