There are new services that replace the most commonly used queries to the deprecated entity query service. They are:
http://docs.synapse.org/rest/POST/entity/children.html
(lists the children of a given parent entity)
http://docs.synapse.org/rest/POST/entity/child.html
(find the entity with a given parent and a given name)
There is a convenience function in Python for the first, but not for the second. Need convenience function in Python (and by extension in R) to facilitate users stop using the entity query function.
As Kenny points out, already done!
There isn't a function for "POST /entity/child" to search a container for an entity by name.
We have had a private function def _findEntityIdByNameAndParent(self, name, parent=None) for several years that was switched from query to the /entity/child call in 1.7.
Should this be made public?
To validate:
use syn.findEntityId() to find an entity's id using its name and parent
Validated from R!