RE: [business-transaction] Re: [bt-spec] URIs and address-as-X (MAJOR)

[Peter Furniss <peter.furniss@choreology.com>]

There's several sub-misunderstandings.  I'll jump to one that seems most
entangling the discussion.


> > I'm no longer clear if you are proposing that the tid URI is also an
> > addressing URI; and if *all* the addressing URIs are usable as the tid.
>
> Not the latter, since not everything is a transaction! However, given a
> transaction id, if it's a URI then I can "instantly" contact the
> transaction, or at least know where it was!

NO

If it is a
URI-qualified-by-some-subsetting-to-imply-a-binding/carrier-mechanism-and-th
us-a-way-of-getting-btp-messages-to-it, then yes. But that's actually
equivalent to saying it is a URL (i.e. all such URIs are URLs), and a URL
from some btp scheme too.
(c.f definition of URL in rfc 2396 : The term "Uniform Resource Locator"
(URL) refers to the subset of URI that identify resources via a
representation of their primary access mechanism (e.g., their network
"location"), rather than identifying the resource by name or by some other
attribute(s) of that resource.)

But our proposal was that the tid should really be a URI. Any URI. The only
constraint would be that the URI was only ever used for one transaction.  It
might have locational meaning (be URLs), but the protocol would not specify
any use to be made of any location implications. It might be a URL in scheme
and appearance, but even then the protocol would not require that it
corresponded to anywhere really accessible.

Compare use of URI's to identify xml namespaces - they don't have to be
URL's (the BTP ones aren't). Even if they are URLs (often convenient,
because if I control a domain name I can create http URLs and be sure they
are unique), they don't have to correspond to anywhere. But they identify a
namespace perfectly well. All that xml processors do is match the string in
xmlns:abc= to what they saw in targetNamespace= (and equivalents).

It seemed worth pulling this out, since if we say "URI" but mean something
that can be relied on to have location significance, we confuse things.

Peter