[regrep] Re: Preliminary OASIS/ebXML Registry Tests - remarks

[Len Gallagher <lgallagher@nist.gov>]

Michal,

Thank you very much for your comments on the preliminary Registry test 
requirements that the OASIS Registry technical committee is considering, 
cf  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/regrep/200206/msg00084.html . I 
hope you don't mind that I'm copying my response to that group because I 
know they'll be interested.

You raise an issue about how much information is required to be submitted 
for each User of the Registry. Some of the tests I submitted were purposely 
trying to submit User and Organization instances with just the minimum 
amount of required information. The XML Schema allows submissions that 
appear to be missing information that may be required by RIM. I do not know 
if this was intentional! Your concern is that two of the proposed 
submissions for users do not contain information that appears to be 
required by RIM, namely the submission for Registration Authority and 
Responsible Organization:

  ftp://xsun.sdct.itl.nist.gov/regrep/submits/SubmitRA.xml    (Section 2.3 
of test requirements)

  ftp://xsun.sdct.itl.nist.gov/regrep/submits/SubmitRORG.xml  (Section 2.6 
of test requirements)

The first submission contains Address and TelephoneNumber elements that do 
not have any attributes. The submissions validate because all attributes 
are optional even though the parent element is required. The submissions 
validate to the XML Schema v2.0 for Registry, but it may violate the RIM 
rules in Sections 8.2.2, 8.2.3, 8.2.5 and 8.2.6 that appear to require a 
person name, postal address, telephone number, and email address for each User.

I think you have an excellent point. The committee clearly intended that 
Registration Authorities be allowed to reject User and/or Organization 
submissions if they didn't contain some minimum amount of information. 
What's less clear is whether the committee intended that implementations 
fail to conform if they relax some of those requirements. For example, if 
the submission contains a "name" attribute for a user role that is not a 
real person, must it also contain a PersonName element with some 
superfluous person attributes filled in?

When I proposed these initialization submissions, I did not intend for them 
to be controversial. I wanted to submit at least one User and one 
Organization with the minimum amount of information required by the 
Registry specification. Frankly, I was concentrating on the minimal XML 
Schema requirements for User and Organization and forgot to coordinate that 
with explicit or implied requirements in RIM.

I'd encourage the committee to re-visit this issue and decide on the 
appropriate minimum amount of non-null information required for every User 
and Organization instance. Then we can modify SubmitRA.xml and 
SubmitRORG.xml (just as Michal Zaremba did) so that those two submissions 
will be accepted by most Registry implementations. The remainder of the 
tests require that those submissions be successful!

-- Len

ASIDE: I don't think it is required anyplace that required string 
attributes be of length greater than zero. May a conforming implementation 
reject submissions that have zero-length strings, or non-visible 
characters, for required attributes?


At 05:49 PM 7/20/2002 +0100, Michal Zaremba wrote:
>Len,
>
>I have been trying to execute the Preliminary OASIS/ebXML Registry Tests
>within ebxmlrr repository. During "The setup and initialisation" phase I
>found following errors in xml files:
>
>The failure of test because of errors in "SubmitRA.xml" and "SubmitRORG.xml"
>files. The missing are following required tags (see RIM v.2.0 ­ page 29
>section 8.2.1):
>·<rim:Address/>
>·<rim:PersonName/>
>·<rim:TelephoneNumber/>
>·<rim:EmailAddress address = "some@some.ie"/> (element cannot be empty
>because according to 8.2.3 a user must have at least one email address)
>
>After inclusion of those elements the two tests executed properly.
>
>Best regards,
>Michal Zaremba
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>Michal Zaremba,
>Researcher,
>Computer Integrated Manufacturing Research Unit (CIMRU),
>National University of Ireland,
>Galway
>--------------------------------------------------------
>Tel. :       + 353 91 512219 (Direct line)
>              + 353 91 524411 (NUI, Galway) Ext. 3178
>              + 353 91 750414 (CIMRU)
>Fax.:        + 353 91 562894 (CIMRU)
>Email:       michal.zaremba@nuigalway.ie
>URL:         http://cimru.nuigalway.ie
>---------------------------------------------------------