> My question is: how can I effectively manage a 'simultaneous user'
> resource consumption policy without an explicit client request to
> terminate the session?
> It isn't really an issue of resources consumed by open sessions, I could
> care less about that. Its more of a question on how to accomodate the
> business model where institutional access to a database is sold on a
> simultaneous user basis. In this model, users are counted as
> simultaneous users from the moment they do their first search, until
> they explicitly logout, or timeout.
Yes, it's a business model issue, not a protocol issue. There are
far too many business models to try and cope with so I believe that we
said anything which is put in solely to accomodate a model is considered
out of the scope of SRW (for example how to /acquire/ an authentication
token for the first time isn't specified)
> the broadcast phase. It would work better if we didn't count them as a
> user until they started browsing results.
We don't count them as anything :) SRW makes no statement about users,
simultaneous or otherwise.
However I think what you really want is the resultSetTTL parameter of 1.1?
You can go to a server and say 'Hello I want a result set for 30 seconds'
At the end of that time, if you haven't refreshed it, then the result set
can disappear and your 'user' can be logged out.
Or you're perfectly at liberty to create a 'userLogout' request if that's
what suits your business model best. If you'd like to write up the model
and the needed requests, then I think that Ray should host the
documentation on the web site, but note that even the authenticationToken
is a recommended best practice, not an official part of the protocol.
Rob
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