On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 10:46:50PM -0400, LeVan,Ralph wrote:
> > From: Alan Kent [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2002 9:54 PM
> >
> > However, there is a negative - which is that the SRW end point that
> > you want to search would not return information about itself - you
> > would have to access a different SRW endpoint to get the ZeeRex record.
>
> I don't think that's true.  We are going to use (maybe) the ZeeRex record,
> not the Explain service.  SRW wasn't going to have a separate database for
> querying.  In SRW, we are going to send an empty query of the database we
> connect to and return an Explain record.
>
> The Explain models are different between SRW and classic Z39.50.
>
> Ralph

In the second half of the mail I actually agreed with the notion of
what you said above - that a SRW should be able to return a ZeeRex
record describing the server. Any empty query string is one way
of doing it, the other (which I suggested) was to have a separate
SOAP method for doing it. With SRW I don't see much benefit in
reusing the one method for different purposes (there is little or
no cost in adding additional functions). In SRU on the other hand,
using a zero length query may have real attraction (and it might be
worth using a zero length query in SRW to keep it similar to SRU).

But basically I agree that an endpoint should return its own ZeeRex
record. The actual mechanics of it I am less worried about.

Alan