Missing MTI - what to do?

[Eric Burger <Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu>]

There are only three choices if one is missing or has an odd MTI field:

• Fail the transaction / reject to document
• Ignore the field
• Fix the field if you can

I would offer we say what we mean. There are two places to do that. The first is in the spec itself. For example, if “id” is missing, I think we would say in the spec the serialization is malformed and return an error (or silently go away). The second is to tag the transaction, perhaps at the TAXII level, with what you want to have happen. For example, if I have private extensions, I can tag them as something you can freely ignore or drop. Conversely, if I have extensions or optional fields that you really need to understand to process the message, I can tag them as something that if you do not recognize them, fail the document so I know you do not know. 

For an example of this working in email system gateways, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3459

On Jan 27, 2016, at 10:57 AM, Paul Patrick <ppatrick@isightpartners.com> wrote:

As a side note, I’ve not seen a statement about what the appropriate behavior should be when a JSON MTI compliant consumer receives a document with a field it doesn’t understand (maybe due to a typo or somebody tried to make a private extension).  But if the specified behavior was to ignore the field rather than fail the processing of the entire document, then under the situation where a JSON-LD language binding document was inadvertently sent to a consumer that only excepts JSON MTI language binding, the behavior would still allow the document to be processed as a compliant JSON MTI document since the @nodes and @fields would be ignored or skipped.

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