RE: HREF Property in Thai Restaurant

At 04:32 PM 11/18/99 +0000, Mark Birbeck wrote:
>Hi Jim,
>
>Thanks for your time on this one - I hope I'm not just being dim!

Far from it, you are asking good questions - the kind that make me think
through the issues better. I am grateful for them.  Besides perhaps it is I who
is dim for not expressing myself clearly.  But let's carry on.

>...Surely I should be able to manipulate *my* indexes? In
>the example given, haven't *I* created the restaurant index, which
>happens to point to a restaurant's web site? Of course I can't delete
>their web site. But I am using WebDAV to manipulate *my* index entries,
>and DASL to search them, and so I should be able to manipulate them. 

Aha.  Now I think I see what the confusion is.  You and I are trying to use the
URL for two different things.  Usually we want it to stand for the resource
being indexed (the  restaurant), but sometimes we want it to stand for the
index itself.  This is why you want to be able to do a PROPPATCH on
siamiam.com, to change the rating.

Do you agree that this is the problem?

>I suppose you have, since as far as I can see the 'href' is always set
>to point to the resource being described, and not the resource
>description. 

Yes.

I think we are seeing it the same way now.

I don't think this is a problem with the Protocol per se, but only with the way
we are using it
If so, this is really the same problem that other areas in WebDAV face, where
one has for example a script on a web server.  Sometimes you want a GET on that
resource to run the script and produce the output, but sometimes you want the
GET to just give you back the script.

So there are at least two ways we could solve this.

1) the operators of the restaurant rating service could stop putting the URL of
the restaurant in the href of the propfind.  Then the href would be the URL of
the index entry, not the thing being indexed.  That URL would be stored in some
property and returned in the usual way

<D:response> 
   <D:href>http://ryu.com/rating259</D:href> 
   <D:propstat> 
     <D:prop> 
        <R:href>http://siamiam.com</r:href>
        <R:location>259 W. Hollywood</R:location> 
        <R:rating><R:stars>4</R:stars></R:rating> 
     </D:prop> 
 </D:propstat> 
</D:response>

now there is never any confusion.

2)  Designate some mechanical transformation on the URLs, so that e.g in this
case to get to the resource that designates the index for siamiam.com, you
would prepend it with 
http://ryu.com/indexof. 

You might also use the WebDAV link property to help find the latter from the
former.

Does this solve the problem?

Jim

Received on Thursday, 18 November 1999 18:43:24 UTC