Client - server synchronisation
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OpenTox objects and their representation at webservices live independent of each other. You can create and manipulate objects at the client side without affecting their representation at the webservice. On the other hand the server side representation might change while you are working locally on an object with the same address.

For synchronisation between client and server representations you can use the standard REST methods get, post (rarely useful), put and delete.

Examples:

get To obtain a resource representation from the webservice

feature = OpenTox::Feature.new my_uri, @@subjectid
# feature is more or less empty, apart from some default entries
feature.get # download metadata
# work with the representation from the webservice
puts feature.metadata.inspect
...

put Save a local object at the webservice

feature = OpenTox::Feature.new nil, @@subjectid # create a new feature
feature.title = "My test feature" # set the title
feature[RDF.type] = RDF::OT.NominalFeature # add a feature type
feature.put # save the feature at the webservice

delete Delete object at webservice

feature = OpenTox::Feature.new my_uri, @@subjectid
feature.delete
feature.get # fails

Special cases:

datasets: Use Dataset#get_metadata to download only metadata. Dataset#get will retrieve all data entries.

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