Ralph,

Have you worked out a solution to this problem ?. Not having the Database
URL in the response makes it difficult to code a very thin client (i.e XSLT
only), also it means that if the response becomes separated from the process
that knows the URL used to generate this response, there is no way of
knowing where the search was performed. For example if you save a response,
without adding the URL to the response data, there is no means of knowing
where the search was performed.

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: LeVan,Ralph [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 28 January 2004 18:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Database URL in EchoedRequests


How do you guys feel about having the SRU server put the database URL into
the EchoedRequest part of the response?

There is no problem when I use forms.  The problem is getting back to my
starting point when I use anchors.  Here's the scenario:

I send in the URL: http://oclc.org/SRW/test and I get back an
explainResponse which gets rendered into a search screen.  The search screen
has a form with no action attribute in it.  That causes the browser to send
the form back to the same URL as before and my search works perfectly.  I
get a searchRetrieveResponse which is rendered into a results screen.  Now,
I'd like an anchor that points me back to the search screen.  But if I use
<a>Home</a>, I get sent back to http://oclc.org/SRW.  The browser thinks
that "test" was a document in directory SRW and uses that directory as the
base URL for the anchor href.

Now, I can get around this by replacing <a href="">Home</a> with <form
method="get"><input type="submit" value="Home"></form>, but that's just a
little clumsy.  The cleaner mechanism would be to have the server echo back
the base URL.  Then generated HTML could actually use a <base> element.

Not a show stopper, just a thought.

Ralph


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