The Boring XNAT Library (BXL)

BXL is a library for interacting with the REST interface of XNAT (Extensible Neuroimaging Archive Toolkit), an open-source imaging informatics software platform.

Usage

Installation

BXL is available at PyPI, the Python Package Index.

With pip package management system:

 pip install bxl

Without pip:

 git clone https://gitlab.com/bbrc/xnat/bxl.git .
 cd ./bxl
 python setup.py install

Credentials handling

The xnat.Connection() class constructor expects a credentials argument to be passed when instantiated,

• If is a tuple, it will proceed to a basic authentication procedure against the host XNAT instance.
• If is a basestring, it will reuse it as a cookie for authentication against the host XNAT instance.
• Otherwise (or if authentication procedure failed in the aforementioned cases), it will remain offline.

Examples

Connect to XNAT instance using an existing JSESSIONID token and get a list of user-visible XNAT projects

 import bxl.xnat as xlib

 c = xlib.Connection(hostname='http://myxnat.org',credentials='1A12346385E876546C99B4179E20986A')
 data = c.get_projects()

 projects = { item['ID'] : item['URI'] for item in data.values() }
 print(projects)

 c.close_jsession()            

Connect via 'with' statement to create a new Female subject 'dummy' in the 'test' project

 from bxl import xnat

 with xnat.Connection(hostname='http://myxnat.org',credentials=(usr,pwd)) as c :
     response = c._put_resource(URI = c.host + '/data/projects/test/subjects/dummy',
                                options = {'gender' : 'female'} )
     subject_uid = response.content
     print 'New subject %s created!' %subject_uid