The intent of this document is to collect design ideas for the dataone R package. Both new functionality and refactoring of current implementations can be included. Once a consensus has been reached for a particular implementation, then more formal documentation can be prepared, if desired, i.e. UML activity diagrams, sequence charts, etc.
The current DataONE authentication for CNs and MNs can use either authentication tokens or X.509 certificates. Authentication tokens are only supported for DataONE nodes that support the V2 DataONE API. Also, the DataONE service requests can be send to either production or testing nodes, requiring different authentication for the production versus testing environments.
The current implementation uses the DataONE API version number to determine whether an authentication token can be used. The API version is obtained from a DataONE node when the MNode or CNode instance for that node is created. The node instance is passed along to the various auth_* methods so that they can test for an retrieve the correct authentication for the node that the request is being made to.