Tutorial

This tutorial provides a step by step introduction to the usage of python-icat. It intents to give an overview of python-icat’s most noteworthy features. You need to have python-icat installed to run the examples. You also need a running ICAT server and IDS server to connect to. Some examples in the tutorial assume to have root access and modify data, therefore it is not advisable to use a production ICAT. Rather setup a dedicated test ICAT to run the tutorial.

During the tutorial you will create some simple Python scripts and other files in your local file system. It is advisable to create a new empty folder for that purpose and change into that:

$ mkdir python-icat-tutorial
$ cd python-icat-tutorial

Some of the more advanced tutorial sections will require some example content in the ICAT server. You’ll need the file icatdump-5.0.yaml to set it up. This file can be found in the doc/examples directory in the python-icat source distribution.

The tutorial assumes some basic knowledge in programming with Python as well as some basic understanding of ICAT. The tutorial contains the following sections:

• Hello World!
• Configuration
• Authentication and login
• Creating stuff in the ICAT server
  • Creating simple objects
  • Relationships to other objects
  • Access rules
• Working with objects in the ICAT server
  • Editing the attributes of objects
  • Copying objects
• Searching for objects in the ICAT server
  • Building advanced queries
  • Useful search methods
• Upload and download files to and from IDS
  • Upload files
  • Download files
• Advanced configuration
  • Custom configuration variables
  • Flag configuration variables
  • Defining sub-commands
  • Preset configuration values in the program

Note

Throughout this tutorial, we assume the name of the Python executable to be just python and the full path used in the interpreter line of scripts to be /usr/bin/python. It is likely that this assumption does not hold in your environment. Quite often, a version number is appended to the executable name as in python3 or python3.11 and the Python executable might reside in another directory in your system. You may need to adapt accordingly.