use case requiring failure if locale is not available

Currently, if a requester specifies a locale and the service does not
know of or has no provision for that particular locale, you get some
default behaviors. The behaviors may be completely unrelated or
inappropriate for the requested locale.

However, if Web Services are to be used in an automated fashion, this
may be unacceptable.

For example, if a business prepares to produce a large run of reports
overnight, and the locale of the user for each report is specified,
there is no way of knowing which reports have been satisfactorily
produced and can be given to the user and which reports will not meet
the user's needs (wrong date formats, language etc.) and should not be
given to the user. (I am assuming the user is a paying customer of the
business.)


It would be better in this situation for a web service to return an
error indicating that the locale is unknown or not provided for and to
have the service request error. This would allow the business to choose
suitable alternatives in behalf of the users with failed requests and
rerun the reports to get acceptable ones.

This is of course an argument for an upfront negotiation of locale, but
if there isn't a negotiation and agreement on locale behaviors, having
the request fail when a locale is not supported is necessary for some
services to be viable.
It might also be the case that between the time of the negotiation and
the execution of the actual request a locale might be removed.

My service uses another service for Chinese support, and after
negotiating locales and accepting chinese, the chinese service goes
off-line. If I continue processing it won't be in Chinese. It might be
better to fail the request.


Some definition for a successful match and a failing match is needed.

If en-us is requested and the service has en but not en-us, that might
be considered successful from a language point of view, but a failure
with respect to date formats. (mdy vs dmy)

On the other hand if en-us is requested and the service only offers es
or zh, then perhaps it should be failed.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
XenCraft		            http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2003 14:45:58 UTC