RE: Collections

At 03:45 PM 9/16/97 PDT, Jim Whitehead wrote:
>

>> To reconcile the two specifications, I think (1) it would be very useful 
>for
>> us to provide an index that describes the entire hierarchy rather than 
>just
>> one level.
>
>The issue here is how to bound the size of the index results.  DRP is able 
>to bound the size of their index results because this index file can be 
>manually created, and because the creator of the index file can ensure that 
>it will never become too large.  I don't think DRP is suggesting that their 
>index files be used as a general purpose mechanism for retrieving the 
>contents of all collections.  Rather, DRP is interested in getting a 
>consistent configuration of resources (and their content identifiers) for 
>each "channel," which is presumably a smaller set than all possible 
>resources on the server.
>
>My fear with returning a full depth infinity index for all cases is that 
>some cases (e.g., collections high up in a hierarchy) may return very large 
>results, which could cause a problem for low-memory clients.
>

I see that this is a problem.  I wonder whether we could let the client
specify one level or depth=infinity in the request, or perhaps specify a
maximum size for the response.

--Judy

Name:			Judith A. Slein
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