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On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 10:40:42AM -0400, Ray Denenberg wrote:
> Poul Henrik J�rgensen wrote: I support Ralph's views...
> Ralph's view was: I'd be happier with the extensible XML document.
> Alan Kent wrote:
> > Put another way, a ZeeRex record may be able to describe a SRW server.
> > But does that mean SRW should use a ZeeRex record as the SRW explain
> > mechanism?

To me there are some orthogonal issues going on here in my mind. But I
may be mixing *implementation* of a SRW server with a user's view of
a server.

> I also sense that you (Alan in particular) aren't comfortable that ZeeRex
> meets the needs of srw.

Its more I thought that SRW should work out its requirements, then once
that was done determine if ZeeRex was suitable.

> So I think it's time that we determine what these requirements are,
> before we can have much more meaningful discussion on this.
> Could you three please give some thought and list what you think
> are the ZeeRex requirements? Thanks.
>
> --Ray

I assume you mean SRW requirements, not ZeeRex requirements? Or SRW
requirements of ZeeRex? Regardless...

I might back up a little here and say I can understand Ralph's
and Poul's views on wanting an extensible record. This is not suitable
for directly inclusion in a standard WSDL file (don't want an extensible
SOAP API). So we could avoid lots of discussions and simply say we will
use the Explain Classic approach of Explain information as being records
in a database. This fits directly into SRW which uses XML for records
already.

However, there is a negative - which is that the SRW end point that
you want to search would not return information about itself - you
would have to access a different SRW endpoint to get the ZeeRex record.
(A SRW end point is always a single database.) A better alternative
may therefore be to introduce a new SOAP method call to return the
ZeeRex record as XML (in a SOAP string like normal SRW records) for
that SRW endpoint. This would be my preference.

    search(....) returning records
    explain() returning a single ZeeRex record

We could always just try it and see what happens...
Alan