Hbase REST API Question

[Diwanshu Shekhar <di...@gmail.com>]

​I am running through some issues related to Hbase REST API.

Let me give you a little background first:
I built an HBase table in my company's CDH cluster. The row key is "<some
string>|<some string>" . column family is "d" and the column qualifier is
the date which is also string (e.g., 2012-01-27). In order to provide
access to the table data to other interested people in the company, I built
a Django API and it works great. Somebody in my team suggested that Hbase
comes with a built-in API and I could use it directly to get access to the
data. I read the online HBase documentation and indeed looks like there is
something already off-the-shelf that comes with HBase. But I haven't been
successful using it and therefore I am here seeking for help.

 Here is a list of issues that  I am running through:

 1. Chrome Browser
      In the Chrome browser, I typed in the following url:
      http://< ip address>:20550/namespace:tablename/ #00003|313001098/d
     I was expecting that it will render the data specific to the provided
row key in the browser, but instead it downloads an html file that contains
data for only one column qualifier and it doesn't have any information on
which column qualifier the data pertains to.

 2. Curl
     I did the same with curl command in unix shell.
     curl -i http://< ip
address>:20550/namespace:tablename/%2300003%7C313001098/d
    Please note that %23 is an encoding for # and %7C is an encoding for |
(pipe).
    The above command only gives me the data for one column qualifier.

I double checked my data using HBase shell using the following command:

     get 'namespace:tablename', '#00003|313001098'

and I get the data from multiple column qualifiers. Therefore, I can
confirm that either I am missing something or the HBase built-in API is not
built for doing the things I am trying to do.

Thanks in advance.

Diwanshu