On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Mike Taylor wrote:
> > From: "Matthew J. Dovey" <[log in to unmask]>

> >> What about SRU, which doesn't have any convenient place to put this
> >> information? It's just out of luck?
> > If a 1.1 server gets a parameter defined in 1.1 but not in 1.0 then
> > it knows it is dealing with a 1.1 client and can return the
> > appropriate response.
>
> An observation: if this approach will work for SRU, then it will also
> work for SRW, and we'd then not have to bother at all with all the
> namespace stuff that Rob objects to.  I am not necessarily arguing

I don't object very strongly, mind, it's just a pain to keep track of, so
I foresee interop issues at the toolkit level... taking us back to the age
of hand unraveling BER/ASN1 packets.

> ... It occurs to me that servers that support both SWU and SRW (do
> most servers fall into that category?) will need to implement two

I believe the idea was that once you had implemented SRW, it should be 10
minutes work to extend it to SRU.  (Which was the case for me at least)

> different versioning schemes if we do use namespaces for that purpose
> in SRW.  That seems wrong.  So maybe for both SRW and SRU, we should

More importantly it means you need completely separate request handling
systems whereas at the moment all we need to do is pass it through,
serialise the response and strip out the SOAP elements. (Which is why it's
only 10 minutes work, and one reason why I prefer recordPacking/recordXML)

> just have servers respond according to the highest protocol level they
> can tell the client to support?  (And SRW request packets could
> include a <whatProtocolVersionISupport>1.2</whatProtocolVersionISupport>
> element.)

It would be optional, of course, and if not present it defaults to 1.0

How did OAI handle the 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 transitions?

Rob

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