Getting Started with Flywheel SDK

Introduction

The Flywheel SDK is a matlab toolbox that provides programmatic access to the Flywheel API endpoints.

Installation

Click here to download the latest Matlab Toolbox: Download.

Installation can be done one of two ways, depending on your Operating System. For OSX and Windows you should be able to double-click the downloaded toolbox in order to perform the installation.

If your Operating System does not support double-click installation of toolboxes, you can install from within the matlab console.

toolboxFile = '/path/to/flywheel-sdk-version.mltbx';
installedToolbox = matlab.addons.toolbox.installToolbox(toolboxFile)

API Key

The SDK requires an API key. You can find and generate your key on the Flywheel profile page. It will look like this:

Making API Calls

In order to make API calls, you will need to create an instance of the Flywheel client:

% Create client
fw = flywheel.Client('my-key')

Once you have a client instance, you can interact with the system. For instance, you could get information about yourself:

self = fw.getCurrentUser();
fprintf('I am %s %s\n', self.firstname, self.lastname);

Using CLI Credentials

If you’ve logged in using the CLI, you can create a client instance without using an API key. This is useful when sharing SDK scripts for others to use.

% Create client, using CLI credentials
fw = flywheel.Client()

Getting Help

You can query the client or objects returned by api calls for additional information:

help(fw); % Display available functions
disp(self); % Print the properties in the 'self' object

Finding Objects

With the exception of Groups, all containers and objects within Flywheel are referenced using Unique IDs. Groups are the only object that have a human-readable id (e.g. flywheel).

Finding an Object when you are only familiar with the label can be difficult. One method that may help is the flywheel.Flywheel.resolve() method.

Resolve takes a path (by label) to an Object in the system, and if found, returns the full path to that Object, along with children. For example, to find the project labeled Anxiety Study that belongs to the flywheel group, I would call resolve with: 'flywheel/Anxiety Study':

% Resolve project by id
result = fw.resolve('flywheel/Anxiety Study');

% Extract the resolved project id
project = result.path{2};

% Print the ids and labels of the path elements
for idx = 1:numel(result.path)
  fprintf('%s: %s\n', result.path{idx}.label, result.path{idx}.id);
end

% Print the children of project:
for idx = 1:numel(result.children)
  fprintf('%s: %s\n', result.children{idx}.label, result.children{idx}.id);
end

In a similar vein to resolve, flywheel.Flywheel.lookup() will directly resolve a container by path. For example:

% Lookup project by id
project = fw.lookup('flywheel/Anxiety Study');

Finally, if the ID of the Object is known, then it can be retrieved directly using the flywheel.Flywheel.get() method.

% Get session by id
session = fw.get('5bed87475b0ab53e50d03e0c');

Working with Objects

Most Objects in the Flywheel SDK provide methods for common operations. For example, to update properties on an object, you can simply call the update method, passing in a dictionary or key value pairs:

% Update a project's label
project.update('label', 'New Project Label');

% Update a subject's type and sex
subject.update(struct('type', 'human', 'sex', 'female'));

It’s important to note that calling update will not update your local copy of the object! However, you can quickly refresh an object by calling reload:

% Reload a session
session = session.reload();

Working with Finders

Another way to find objects is via Finders provided at the top level, and on objects. Finders allow locating objects via arbitrary filtering. Depending on which version of a finder method you call, you can retrieve all matching objects, or the first matching object. Finally, if you want to walk over a large number of objects, finders support iteration.

% Retrieve all projects (with a default limit)
allProjects = fw.projects();

% Find the first project with a label of 'My Project'
project = fw.projects.findFirst('label=My Project');

% Find all sessions in project created after 2018-10-31
sessions = project.sessions.find('created>2018-10-31');

% Iterate over all failed jobs
itr = fw.jobs.iterFind('state=failed');
while itr.hasNext()
        job = itr.next();
        fprintf('Job: %s, Gear: %s\n', job.id, job.gearInfo.name);
end

% Iterate over all sessions belonging to project
iter = project.sessions.iter();
while iter.hasNext()
        session = iter.next();
        fprintf('%s\n', session.label);
end

Dealing with Files

Often times you’ll find yourself wanting to upload or download file data to one of Flywheel’s containers. When uploading, you can either specify the path to the input file, or you can specify some in-memory data to upload using the FileSpec object.

% Upload the file at /tmp/hello.txt
project.uploadFile('/tmp/hello.txt');

% Upload the data 'Hello World!'
fileSpec = flywheel.FileSpec('hello.txt', 'Hello World!\n', 'text/plain');
project.uploadFile(fileSpec);

% Some endpoints allow multiple file uploads:
analysis.uploadOutput({'/tmp/hello1.txt', '/tmp/hello2.txt'});

When downloading, you specify the destination file, or you can download directly to memory. Supported OutputType values are:

• int8

• int16

• int32

• int64

• double (default)

• char

% Download file to /tmp/hello.txt
project.downloadFile('hello.txt', '/tmp/hello.txt');

% Download file directly to memory as an array of doubles
data = project.readFile('hello.txt');

% Download file directly to memory as a char cell array
data = project.readFile('hello.txt', 'OutputType', 'char');

% Get information about a zip file
zipInfo = acquisition.getFileZipInfo('my-archive.zip');

% Download the first zip entry to /tmp/{entry_name}
entryName = zipInfo.members{1}.path;
outPath = fullfile('/tmp', entryName);
acquisition.downloadFileZipMember('my-archive.zip', entryName, outPath);

% Read the "readme.txt" zip entry directly to memory
zipData = acquisition.readFileZipMember('my-archive.zip', 'readme.txt', 'OutputType', 'char');

Handling Exceptions

When an error is encountered while accessing an endpoint, an exception is thrown. The exception message will have more details.

For example:

try
  project = fw.getProject('NON_EXISTENT_ID');
catch ME
  fprintf('API Error: %s\n', ME.message);
end

SSL CA Certificates

By default the SDK uses an internal set of CA certificates for SSL validation. If desired, this behavior can be overridden, and a set of PEM encoded certificates can be used instead.

To do this, set the FW_SSL_CERT_FILE to the absolute path of the certificates file.

For example:

export FW_SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/cert.pem