We have implemented sorting in SRU (as a local extension to the
SRU-protocol) by excepting sortid=field as url parameter. In our
implementation 'field' can be any field in the brief recordSchema. In
our implementation a sortid is only relevant in searching. From the
sorted resultset one can obtain records by specifying resultsetid
and startRecord and maximumRecords.I would be very glad when
this feature is not a local extension anymore.
With respect to Ralph's idea to make separate webservices I
wonder whether this means that the responseSchema is back
again? If it is a matter of searching with or without sorting I think a
simple optional sort parameter would be sufficient.
I assume (and hope) that in SRU we keep the base-url for different
webservices identical. In that case the distiction between different
services will allways be based on the actual URL parameters (which
I prefer) and than an optional sort parameter would indeed be
sufficient.
For further details on sorting I agree to defere the debate a while.

Theo


On 3 Jun 02, at 16:04, LeVan,Ralph wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Robert Sanderson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 3:37 PM
> >
> > Agreed. But that opens a great big can of worms known as
> > 'sort' and all
> > the various options of sorting that you can ask for in Z39.50.
> >
> > Not that I'm against opening it, but I think that it takes us
> > another step
> > away from the simple lean clean and hopefully useful SRW towards the
> > not-so-simple, putting on weight, slightly dirty and more likely to
> > be useful SRW which others don't want to go to yet.
>
> I don't want to go there yet.  When we do go there, I'm going to push
> hard for sort being a completely separate service.  I'm very aware
> that the sorting can be made much more efficient if done while
> creating the result set and I'm eager for a compromise that puts it
> into the search.  But, we never came up with a clean way to do that in
> classic z39.50 and I'm not optomistic about it happening in SRW.  But,
> I'd like to defer the debate for a while.
>
> Ralph