Re: Describing headers accepted by a supported operation

Hi Dietrich,

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Dietrich Schulten <ds@escalon.de> wrote:

> Hi Nandana,
>
> Am 06.03.2015 um 17:45 schrieb Nandana Mihindukulasooriya:
> > Trying to go even a bit more further, I was wondering whether there was
> > a way to describe the information about the expected or supported
> > headers. For example, If I want to tell a client that it can send a Slug
> > header [1] or a Prefer header for a particular supported operation, is
> > it possible with Hydra?
>
> There is no way to specify supported request headers in hydra yet. On
> the other hand, since the client is an LDP client which handles LDP
> containers, it should know about Slug and Prefer header params and their
> possible effects anyway :)
>

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Yes, that's true. At the moment, the main advantage of using hydra with LDP
is the fact that it makes it possible to describe the expected content for
each operation (without using a custom media type) which is not possible
with LDP until the RDF Data Shapes WG comes with a proper solution.
However, being able to describe about headers is useful too. For example,
the slug header is a MAY and some servers may support it while others may
not. At the moment, there is no way to find it out without trial and error.


But would it be enough to say "supportsHeader: [Slug, Prefer]"? I guess
> not, you want to be more specific about supported parameters if the
> client is really supposed to apply such a request header.
>

Yes, ideally it wouldn't be enough. If the server can express a template, a
regex pattern, or an enumeration of values it helps the client to
understand what are the expected values by the server.

Best Regards,
Nandana