The epic 

The epic 

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1. Downloads Count
2. Page Views
3. Data Breaches/Audit Trail

Downloads Count

This is the main statistic that the users are currently looking for, it provides a way for project owners, funders and data contributor to monitor the interest over time in the datasets published in a particular project, which then reflects on the interest on the project itself and it is a metric of the value provided by the data in the project. This kind of data is related specifically to the usage of the platform by synapse users, since without being authenticated the downloads are not available. This is part of a generic category of statistics that relates to the entities and metadata that is stored in the backend and it's only a subset of aggregate statistic that can be exposed (e.g. number of projects, users, teams etc).

Page Views

This metric is also an indicator to monitor the interest but it plays a different role and focuses on the general user activity over the synapse platform as a whole. While it might be an indicator for a specific project success it captures a different aspect that might span to different type of clients used to interface on the Synapse API and that include information about users that are not authenticated into synapse. For this particular aspect there are tools already integrated (E.g. google analytics) that collect analytics on the user interactions. Note however that this information is not currently available to the synapse users, nor setup in a way to produce information about specific projects pages, files, wikis etc.

Data Breaches/Audit Trail

Another aspect that came out and might seem related is the identification of when/what/why of potential data breaches (e.g. a dataset was released even though it was not supposed to). This relates to the audit trail of users activity in order to identify potential offenders. While this information is crucial it should not be exposed by the API, and a due process is in place in order to access this kind of data.

Project Statistics

With this brief introduction in mind this document focuses on the main driving use case, that is:

• A funder and/or project creator would like to have a way to understand if the project is successful and if its data is used.

There are several metrics that can be used in order to determine the usage and success of a project, among which:

• Project Access (e.g. page views)
• Number of Downloads
• Number of Uploads
• User Discussions

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• Expose statistics about number of download and number of uploads
• Expose statistics about the number of unique users that downloaded and/or uploaded
• Statistics are collected on a per project basis (no file level statistics)
• Statistics limited to the last 12 months
• Statistics aggregated monthly (no total downloads or total users)
• Statistics are accessible to the project owner/administrator onlyaccess is restricted through a new ACCESS_TYPE VIEW_STATISTICS, initially granted to project owners and administrators
• No run-time filtering filtering

Files, Downloads and Uploads

Files in synapse are referenced through an abstraction (FileHandle) that maintain the information about the link to the content of the file itself (e.g. an S3 bucket). A file handle is then referenced in many places (such as FileEntity and WikiPage, see FileHandleAssociateType) as pointers to the actual file content. In order to actually download the content the synapse platform allows to generated a pre-signed url (according to the location where the file is stored) that can be used to directly download the file. Note that the platform has no way to guarantee that the pre-signed url is actually used by the client in order to download a file. Every single pre-signed url request in the codebase comes down to a single method getURLForFileHandle.

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In general computing statistics might be an expensive operation, moreover in the future we might want to extend the API to include several different types of statistics. According to For the current use cases and the requirements case we can potentially pre-compute statistics aggregates monthly for the projects so that we can serve them relatively quickly , nevertheless with a single lookup. While we cannot guarantee that all type kind of statistics will return within a reasonable response time. To this end we propose an API that integrates into the current /asynchronous/job API (See Asynchronous Job API) so that a client can send a request to compute certain statistics and wait for the final response polling the API for the result. This allows that will be exposed in the future can be pre-computed and will return within a reasonable response time to ease the clients integration we propose to have a dedicated endpoint that will return the statistics for a project within a single synchronous HTTP call.

If in the future we require more complex and/or expensive computation for certain statistics we can extend the API to integrate with the /asynchronous/job API (See Asynchronous Job API) in order to offload the computation to a background worker keeping the API servers free of heavy computation. Note that the computation of certain statistics might actually be relatively short without the need of a background job (e.g. we might be able to cache the statistics for a whole project): using a worker might lead to a small delay in retrieving the statistics from a user point of view but it is probably fine for now. We might want to consider (if needed, as an optimization) to provide from the Asynchronous API the result right away without the need to offload to a background worker.

The two main objects that the statistics API will need to extend are: AsynchronousRequestBody and AsynchronousResponseBody that represent respectively the request for a background job and the response from the job (returned as part of the AsynchronousJobStatus).

Note: In the actual implementation we might have a generic SynapseStatistics interface used as a marker of any statistics request.

Request Object

ProjectStatisticsRequest

<extends> AsynchronousRequestBody

Object used to start the request for retrieving the statistics about a specific project. This object is an AsynchronousResponseBody that will be sent to the /asynchronous/job endpoint in order to start the computation of the project statistics.

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Allows to define which statistics to be included in the response, similarly to the Entity Bundle Services. The supported values are as follow:

• downloads = 0x1
• uploads = 0x2

By default both are included with the mask 0x3 (0x1 + 0x2).

{
	"projectId": "syn12345"
	"mask": 1
}

Response Object

ProjectStatisticsResponse

<extends> AsynchronousResponseBody

Represents the response for a job request for computing the project statistics (In response to a ProjectStatisticsRequest).

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Endpoints

We propose to introduce a dedicated /statistics endpoint that will serve as main entry point to statistics requests. The project statistics are nested within this endpoint:

 The endpoint accepts the following optional URL parameters:

GET /statistics/project/syn123?downloads=true&uploads=false

Response Objects

ProjectStatistics

Represents the response for the project statistics request:

DownloadStatistics/UploadStatistics

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StatisticsCountBucket

The purpose of this object is to include information about the count of a certain metric within a specific time frame (in this case monthly):

StatisticsCountBucket

The purpose of this object is to include information about the count of a certain metric within a specific time frame (in this case monthly):

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{
	"lastUpdatedOn: "2019-26-06T01:01:00.000Z",
	"downloads": {
		"lastUpdatedOn": "2019-26-06T01:01:00.000Z",
		"monthly": [{
			"startDate": "2019-01-06T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 1230,
			"usersCount": 10
		},
		{
			"startDate": "2019-01-05T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 10000,
			"usersCount": 100
		}]
	},
	"uploads": {
		"lastUpdatedOn": "2019-26-06T01:01:00.000Z",
		"monthly": [{
			"startDate": "2019-01-06T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 123051200,
			"usersCount": 10200
		},
		{
			"startDate": "2019-01-05T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 10000,
			"usersCount": 100
		}]
	},
	"uploads": {
		"lastUpdatedOn": "2019-26-06T01:01:00.000Z",
		"monthly": [{
			"startDate": "2019-01-06T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 51200,
			"usersCount": 200
		},
		{
			"startDate": "2019-01-05T00:00:00.000Z", 
			"count": 10000,
			"usersCount": 100
		}]
	}
}

Endpoints

The API reuses the endpoints from the Asynchronous Job API (We could potentially add a dedicated /statistics endpoint just for clarity).

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ProjectStatisticsRequest

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Failures Statuses

A ProjectStatisticsRequest job can fail for a variety of reasons, in particular aside from exceptional cases the AsynchronousJobStatus might be set as failed in the following cases:

• The project specified in the request does not exist (NotFoundException)
• The user that requested the project statistics is not the owner or the administrator of the project (UnauthorizedException)

Additionally we propose to have dedicated statistics endpoints to be consistent with the current API design that accepts the above requests:

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ProjectStatisticsRequest

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}

Web Client Integration

The web client should have a way to show the statistics for a project or a specific file, some initial ideas:

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