srupymarc

The srupymarc package is a fork of the sruthi package, which is a client for python to make SRU requests (Search/Retrieve via URL). Srupymarc extends the original sruthi package by adding one additional field to the searchRetrieve operation to allow users to choose between the following output formats:

• Flattened dict (as implemented in the original sruthi package)
• Pymarc record (default)

The functionality of the explain operation remains unchanged.

Currently only SRU 1.1 and 1.2 is supported.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Testing

Installation

Install this package via the wheels included in the dist/ directory:

$ cd dist
$ pip install srupymarc-2.0.0-py3-none-any.whl

Usage

The explain operation can be performed as follows:

info = srupymarc.explain(url)

The searchRetrieve operation can be performed as follows:

records = srupymarc.searchretrieve(url, query, record_schema, sru_version="1.2", maximum_records=10, output_format="pymarc", suppress_leader_warning=True)

The pymarc output format is only valid with the marcxml record schema. Attempting to use an alternative record schema will yield a runtime error. The flatten output format, however, is schema-agnostic.

Example script

The alma_queries_sruthi.py script provides examples of how to use this package with the Alma SRU API. To run this example, first ensure you are connected to the VPN, so you can access the Alma API. Then, create a python venv as follows:

python -m venv sru_venv
cd examples
pip install -r requirements.txt

Use the alma_queries_sruthi.py script in the examples directory as follows:

python alma_queries_sruthi.py -o [OPERATION] -q [QUERY]

For example, here is how you can query all the articles that include the term pothos in the title. This is a recommended query to test with as it produces just enough records to observe sruthi's record iterating behaviors as described below.

python alma_queries_sruthi.py -o searchRetrieve -q query3

Note that when you request data through sruthi, it will first request the number of records specified by the maximum_records parameter. If you iterate through the returned records, then it will continuously make new API calls to request subsequent records until all the matches have been exhausted. Be wary of this if your query matches a large number of records.

You can update the output format specification by modifying the alma_sru_config.toml file. Valid output format designations are "flatten" for flattened dictionaries, and "pymarc" for pymarc records.

Suppressing the leader warning

The suppress_leader_warning parameter is set to True by default. If you are using pymarc as your output format, and one of the records you pull contains a leader field of a length other than 24, then srupymarc will automatically replace the leader field with a default leader so that pymarc can parse the record. If you would like to see this warning, set the suppress_leader_warning parameter to False.

Testing

To run the unit tests, first create a virtual environment and install the packages needed for testing.

python -m venv testing_venv
pip install -r test-requirements.txt
pip install dist/srupymarc-2.0.0-py3-none-any.whl

Then, move to the tests directory and run the tests:

cd tests
python -m pytest

Build distribution files

If you have created code updates and would like to include the updates in the distribution files, first make sure the code passes all the tests, and then run the following from the root of this repository: This will create the .whl and .tar.gz distribution files in the dist/ directory.

pip install build
python -m build