Ralph <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>>>  http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/sru/intro2sru.txt
>
> You seem to have some confusion about recordPacking.  In the fragment
> below,
> you twice seem to be saying that the alternative to XML for a record
> response is plain text.  That's not true.
>
>> The results of searchRetrieve operations can be returned
>> in any number of formats, as specified via explain
>> operations. Examples might include structured but plain
>> text streams or data marked up in XML vocabularies such
>> as Dublin Core, MARCXML, MODS, etc. Below is a simple
>> request for documents matching the free text query "dogs":
>>
>>  http://example.org/?operation=searchRetrieve&query=dog&version=1.1
>>
>> In this case, the server returns three (3) hits and by
>> default includes Dublin Core title and identifier elements.
>> Each record is packaged in XML as opposed to formatted
>> plain text:
>
> Records are always returned as XML.  RecordPacking specifies whether
> that
> XML can be embedded directly into the response or if it should be
> rendered
> into a single string and then embedded.  The rendering simply turns
> '<' and
> '&' into HTML entities of some kind.  This renders the XML record
> invisible
> to the XML parser that is handling the response.  Subsequent
> processing can
> turn the entities back into characters and the XML record can then be
> turned
> over to an XML parser.  This string representation can save
> considerable
> wasted parsing during the message processing.
>
> It would seem that string encoding would be the clear choice for all
> responses; so why the XML recordPacking option?  For those of us
> writing
> thin clients in SRU, we use XSL stylesheets to render the response.
> The
> string encoded records look like a single atom to XSL and can't be
> easily
> rendered.  So we asked for the records to be directly embedded; hence
> the
> XML recordPacking.

Thank you for the feedback. This is *exactly* the sort of thing I
required. I will edit accordingly, and share with y'all the URL of
article when it gets published.

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame