- From: Robert Bull <bull@crxnet.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 09:24:58 +0100
- To: "Alan Kent" <ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au>, "ZIG" <www-zig@w3.org>
Alan, you can do sorting with our ICONE-2 client. You can download it via page at: http://www.crxnet.com/icone.php It has been tested on a few servers, but as you point out, there is quite a degree of variance on how a sort can be conducted. Rob -----Original Message----- From: Alan Kent [mailto:ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au] Sent: 13 May 2003 08:54 To: ZIG Subject: What Z39.50 clients support sorting, and how do the specify it? Hi all, I was wondering which clients out there support sorting via Z39.50, and how do the clients request sorting? Do they ask for elements, element sets, attribute lists, etc? In particular, in the ASN.1 SortKey ::= CHOICE { sortfield [0] IMPLICIT InternationalString, elementSpec [1] IMPLICIT Specification, sortAttributes [2] IMPLICIT SEQUENCE { id AttributeSetId, list AttributeList } } Which do people use? (The first choice is 'an element, element-group-tag, or alias support by the target and denoting a set of elements associated with each record'.) We were also considering of supporting multiple sort orders on a field. To do this, we need to submit the ordering we want to use. We were thinking of using an attribute for this. That is, Bib-1, USE(1), title(4) SortAttributeSet-1, SORT(2), dictionary-order(1) versus Bib-1, USE(1), title(4) SortAttributeSet-1, SORT(2), ASCII-collating-sequence(2) Or maybe use the new attribute architecture 'language code' attribute to select which language collation sequence to use. (This is necessary for sorting Unicode text for example.) Is there a better way? Another question: SortKeySpec (which has nested in it the SortKey above) specifies the ordering, missing value action, etc. Is there defined or expected behaviour if an element set is specified which includes multiple elements? (The description of 'sortfield' above implies multiplicity too.) There are two forms of semantics I can think of: Identifying multiple elements to sort on means union the values then sort on the result as one new value. Identifying multiple elements means sort on the first element, then the second, then the third etc. The first is useful if you have 'corporate author' and 'personal author'. It would grab which ever author was in the record and sorted on it. So its more useful when records would have one element or the other, but not both. The second makes more sense when the elements are different classes of things (such as titles and authors) rather than similar classes (such as corporate and personal authors). Thanks for any help. Alan -- Alan Kent (mailto:Alan.Kent@teratext.com.au, http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/~ajk/) Project: TeraText Technical Director (http://teratext.com.au) InQuirion Pty Ltd Postal: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001. Where: RMIT MDS, Bld 91, Level 3, 110 Victoria St, Carlton 3053, VIC Australia. Phone: +61 3 9925 4114 Reception: +61 3 9925 4099 Fax: +61 3 9925 4098
Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2003 04:25:09 UTC