Re: draft doc word format

[John McGarvey <mcgarvey@us.ibm.com>]

Comments on the latest draft.

(1) RequestID is included in the schema, but there is no text to describe
its use.  It is listed as a string.  It should be an integer in the range
0-MAXINT.  I suggest the following text.

The RequestID attribute is used to associate a DSMLRequest with a
DSMLResponse.  It is not required in the case where all such associations
are positional within a BatchRequest and a corresponding BatchResponse.
However, even in this case, it may be useful.  For example, if
onError=resume for a given DSMLBatchRequest, it is possible that the
registration of DSMLRequests and DSMLResponses could be thrown off.  Also,
when using the file binding for a large file, use of RequestID may be very
convenient to determine which requests failed.  Finally, the RequestID
attribute useful to identify asynchronous notifications that may be issued
by the server.

When a client sends a DSMLRequest that is not part of a BatchRequest, the
client MUST include a RequestID attribute with the request.  When a client
sends a DSMLRequest that is part of a BatchRequest, the client MAY include
a RequestID attribute with the request.  A client SHOULD NOT reuse a
RequestID value for a DSMLRequest for which the corresponding DSMLResponse
has not been received.  A client MUST NOT send a DSMLRequest with a
RequestID value of 0, as this value is reserved for asynchronous
notifications from the server.  When a server receives a DSMLRequest with a
RequestID attribute, that same RequestID MUST be included in the
corresponding DSMLResponse.  When a server sends an asynchronous
notification, it MUST include the RequestID attribute with value 0.

(2) Is it permitted to have a syntactically incorrect DSMLRequest within a
BatchRequest, without discarding the entire BatchRequest?  I think it
should be -- when processing a file, you typically want to act on each
request within the file as it is parsed instead of parsing the entire file
before acting on any of it.

(3) I think we should add support for asynchronous notification to the SOAP
binding.  In this case, the client would periodically poll for a response
-- perhaps by sending a BatchRequest that contains no DSMLRequests?

(4) The errorResponse type attribute currently consists of the following
enumeration: notAttempted, couldNotConnect, connectionClosed, other.  I
think we may need additional values.  notAttempted is currently used for a
request with a bad format, but I can imagine other reasons that the DSMLv2
gateway may not attempt the request, e.g. a request to retrieve the entire
contents of the directory.   Perhaps we need a separate value for
malformedRequest.  And another for gatewayInternalError.  If the bind is
implicit, i.e. the principal is authenticated by the HTTP transport or
something, gateway authentication to the LDAP server using the client
identity may fail, giving another value, authenticationFailed.  We may need
others.

Regards,
John

To:  DSML version 2 <dsml@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc:
Subject:  draft doc word format



attached is the word format draft

ciao,
Christine