Service Types

In the Locker Project we use a system similar to mime-types to document the types of services where data can be discovered and accessed.

There are two service types, primary types and complete types:

• Primary types: Primary types are high-level, and represent all data of that type. Examples of primary types include message, photo, link, or contact.

• Complete types: Complete types are more specific, and usually represent either an external service or a new complete data structure. Examples of currently used complete service-types are contact/google, photo/flickr and link/chrome.

Each service-type has a definition of a set of REST endpoints, the JSON structure they return, and the JSON structure of any events generated. The definition of this data is stored in a service type definition.

Remember

The service type defines the type of data being accessed, not necessarily the representation of that data. For the data representation of a service type, the Locker uses Service-Type-Definitions.

Connectors define the data they send as primary/secondary service types. The following are some examples:

• contact/google
• photo/flickr
• link/chrome

Collections define the data they send only as a primary service type, as in the following:

• contact - The contacts collection
• photo - The photos collection
• link - The links collection

The current list of active service types for the Locker Project can be found here.