Skip to main content

ChEMBL Web Service Update 2: JSONP Support


We posted earlier in the week about some behind the scenes changes we had made to our Web Services. Having read that post (if you missed the post and use our Web Services please take a look), you will know we setup a temporary base URL to allow users to test the new ChEMBL API powered services. The base URL is:

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chemblws2

We have made it straightforward for users to test the new services as all current methods are available using the new base URL. As well as maintaining existing functionality, we have also been able to add a couple of new features, the first of which is JSONP support. Those familiar with web application development will be familiar with the issue of requesting data from a domain different from that of the domain the web application is running. This type of data requested is prevented by the web browser, due to the enforcement of the same-origin policy. This is an important security concept, but there are times when it being able pull data in from a trusted source enhances the functionality of the web application and makes the life of the developer much easier. Adding JSONP support to the ChEMBL Web Services allows users to now pull ChEMBL data into their web pages with minimal effort. So how do you add JSONP support? Simple, you add an extra argument to the to Web Service call which provides the name of a callback function, which is then used to wrap the regular JSON response.

Currently you can request a JSON response with the following URL:


To create a JSONP response you add the callback argument parameter (Note, you do not need to include .json and the callback argument can be any value):


We hope you find this useful and if you have any questions get in touch.

The ChEMBL Team

Comments

Chris said…
Is it possible to use this to get data for a list of CHEMLid?
Mark Davies said…
At the moment there is no method for submitting a list of chembl_ids, you would need to script something to loop through a list.

Once we have pushed the Web Services running under the temporary chemblws2 URL to live we will be doing a full review of all our Web Services and the ability to submit a list of chembl_ids is functionality we will definitely consider adding.

Popular posts from this blog

ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains:         2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files)         3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds)         20,772,701 activities         1,644,390 assays         15,598 targets         89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding ...

SureChEMBL gets a facelift

    Dear SureChEMBL users, Over the past year, we’ve introduced several updates to the SureChEMBL platform, focusing on improving functionality while maintaining a clean and intuitive design. Even small changes can have a big impact on your experience, and our goal remains the same: to provide high-quality patent annotation with a simple, effective way to find the data you need. What’s Changed? After careful consideration, we’ve redesigned the landing page to make your navigation smoother and more intuitive. From top to bottom: - Announcements Section: Stay up to date with the latest news and updates directly from this blog. Never miss any update! - Enhanced Search Bar: The main search bar is still your go-to for text searches, still with three pre-filter radio buttons to quickly narrow your results without hassle. - Improved Query Assistant: Our query assistant has been redesigned and upgraded to help you craft more precise queries. It now includes five operator options: E...

Here's a nice Christmas gift - ChEMBL 35 is out!

Use your well-deserved Christmas holidays to spend time with your loved ones and explore the new release of ChEMBL 35!            This fresh release comes with a wealth of new data sets and some new data sources as well. Examples include a total of 14 datasets deposited by by the ASAP ( AI-driven Structure-enabled Antiviral Platform) project, a new NTD data se t by Aberystwyth University on anti-schistosome activity, nine new chemical probe data sets, and seven new data sets for the Chemogenomic library of the EUbOPEN project. We also inlcuded a few new fields that do impr ove the provenance and FAIRness of the data we host in ChEMBL:  1) A CONTACT field has been added to the DOCs table which should contain a contact profile of someone willing to be contacted about details of the dataset (ideally an ORCID ID; up to 3 contacts can be provided). 2) In an effort to provide more detailed information about the source of a deposited dat...

Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

    Dear SureChEMBL users, If you frequently rely on our "chemistry search" feature, today brings great news! We’ve recently implemented a major update that makes your search experience faster than ever. What's New? Last week, we upgraded our structure search engine by aligning it with the core code base used in ChEMBL . This update allows SureChEMBL to leverage our FPSim2 Python package , returning results in approximately one second. The similarity search relies on 256-bit RDKit -calculated ECFP4 fingerprints, and a single instance requires approximately 1 GB of RAM to run. SureChEMBL’s FPSim2 file is not currently available for download, but we are considering generating it periodicaly and have created it once for you to try in Google Colab ! For substructure searches, we now also use an RDKit -based solution via SubstructLibrary , which returns results several times faster than our previous implementation. Additionally, structure search results are now sorted by...

A python client for accessing ChEMBL web services

Motivation The CheMBL Web Services provide simple reliable programmatic access to the data stored in ChEMBL database. RESTful API approaches are quite easy to master in most languages but still require writing a few lines of code. Additionally, it can be a challenging task to write a nontrivial application using REST without any examples. These factors were the motivation for us to write a small client library for accessing web services from Python. Why Python? We choose this language because Python has become extremely popular (and still growing in use) in scientific applications; there are several Open Source chemical toolkits available in this language, and so the wealth of ChEMBL resources and functionality of those toolkits can be easily combined. Moreover, Python is a very web-friendly language and we wanted to show how easy complex resource acquisition can be expressed in Python. Reinventing the wheel? There are already some libraries providing access to ChEM...