display optional "description" in API metadata

[andrewsu]

If a user wants to know what a given API is for (e.g., "repodb"), the best options now seem to be to search the API name and/or look at example records. We should also allow an optional "description" to be provided in the manifest.json metadata, which would optionally provide some human-readable description directly on the API page.

EDIT: Sorry, just realized I should probably have created this issue in https://github.com/biothings/pending.api/issues.. Feel free to recreate it over there if helpful.

[newgene]

__metadata__ should already allow to add optional fields like "description" or anything else. It should then be carried over to the /metadata endpoint:

https://github.com/erikyao/repoDB/blob/9ce8f57e84b08c880ebdfd2a513829aa7c1db353/manifest.json#L4-L8

Let's give it a try for the repodb data plugin, the pending API UI will need to be updated to display this "description" text when available.

[erikyao]

After the bugfix (pending.api - Issue#77) and description augmentation (repoDB - PR#2) , repoDB API is updated. However the description is not shown.

I can see that the API page requests metadata from https://biothings.ncats.io/repodb/metadata, and the description is inside the response. Therefore I think it now boils down to a frontend problem.

To @newgene: shall we have @marcodarko involved?

[newgene]

Yes, web UI needs to be updated accordingly as well (@marcodarko)

[marcodarko]

Working on this project right now, I'll add it to my PR

[marcodarko]

Will be addressed in biothings/pending.api#78

[tokebe]

Following up: has this issue been adequately addressed by the above merged PR / should this issue be closed?

[marcodarko]

Descriptions are now available eg. repodb