> > This reminds me of a discussion I had with Adam and some other Index
> Data people a few days ago: is it possible
> > to POST an SRU request instead of GETting it?  It seems to 
> me that it
> _should_ be, but there are pragmatic
> > reason[s] why it might not be the best thing.
> What reasons are there for not allowing it, then? I'm all for 
> allowing it (mostly because of the GET length problem).

At the moment the intent is that the same URL is used for both the SRU
endpoint and the SRW endpoint. The server has to be able to determine
whether it is getting an SRU request or an SRW request, and at present
the server can distinguish that by whether it gets a HTTP GET (hence
SRU) or HTTP POST (hence SRW).

Allowing a HTTP POST to be either SRW (i.e. SOAP) or an SRU based POST
(or potentially a more REST like POST with the SearchRetrieveRequest
cast in XML but not within a SOAP envelope) would

A) require some fiddly logic at the server end which would often mean
hacking the SOAP toolkits to do
B) potentially break existing implementations

Matthew