We host a BioMart server at phytozome.jgi.doe.gov/ A user is having trouble accessing data using biomaRt. I have not used biomaRt much so I cannot answer this question for them.

p = useMart('phytozome_mart',dataset='phytozome',host='phytozome.jgi.doe.gov')

One issue I'm aware of is that we need to use https (this is a requirement by our infrastructure providers) and we need to inform users that they will need to set the global option

options(RCurlOptions=list(followlocation=TRUE))

Is there a way to specify using https in the useMart command? Preceding the hostname with the protocol appears not to work. Or, is there a more direct way for biomaRt to follow 'page moved' responses?

But attempting to retrieve results results in a 'line 1 did not have 3 elements' message and the verbose output shows that it only returns a generic html help page on how to conduct a query

getBM(attributes=c("gene_name1", "transcript_name1", "coding"), filters = "organism_id", values ="314", mart=p,verbose=TRUE)

Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
  line 1 did not have 3 elements

Is there a problem in how our BioMart is configured or in how the query is formulated? I can see from the web server logs that the GET request is hitting the server, but as far as I can see, there are no supplied parameters in the request. My assumption is that when the second request is issued, the parameters have been stripped off.

Thanks

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
[1] C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] biomaRt_2.18.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RCurl_1.95-4.7 XML_3.98-1.3   bitops_1.0-6  

Thanks I can add this to the code

It does look like the protocol is set to http:// in useMart() in a way that can't be over-written. getBM() actually sends a POST request (via RCurl postForm()). It seems that FOLLOWLOCATION when presented with a 302 code (returned by your server when the http query is sent) will switch POST to GET. So the work-around is to provide an appropriate mask to POSTREDIR, e.g.,

options(RCurlOptions=list(followlocation=TRUE, postredir=2L))

That does the trick. the postredir=2L was the part I needed. Thanks!

Will there be a future patch that allows for https and dealing with 'document moved' responses?