RE: Collections

On Tuesday, September 16, 1997 12:42 PM, Judith Slein 
[SMTP:slein@wrc.xerox.com] wrote:
> If there was a discussion period on collections, I missed it.  I do have
> some comments to make, however, especially in light of DRP.

I have been holding off on the discussion period for collections until a 
new draft which incorporates feedback from the Orem and Munich meetings is 
complete.


> The DRP index differs from ours (aside from implementation details) in
> several ways:
>
> 1. It describes the entire hierarchy, whereas ours describes only a 
single
> level of the hierarchy.
>
> 2. It contains different information about each member of the hierarchy.
>
> 3. DRP hierarchies have only internal members, whereas WEBDAV allows both
> internal and external members.
>
> 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.

- Jim

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 1997 18:46:17 UTC