Re: [search-ws] [Issue] Search response can only return XML records

[Farrukh Najmi <farrukh@wellfleetsoftware.com>]

LeVan,Ralph wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Farrukh Najmi [mailto:farrukh@wellfleetsoftware.com] 
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 7:30 AM
>>
>> Currently a record within a Response can only contain an
>> XML record.  There is no support for non-XML records.
>> This is a significant limitation within many standards
>> I work with including ebXML RegRep and OGC Catalog.
>>     
>
> Sorry, but that's not true.  I return BER records inside SRU responses
> all the time.
>   

Sorry if I was not clear before...

Section 4.4 says"

"

All records are transferred in XML. (Records are not assumed to be 
stored in XML. Records which are not natively XML must be first 
transformed into XML before being transferred.) Records may be expressed 
as a single string, or as embedded XML. If a record is transferred as 
embedded XML, it must be well-formed and should be validatable against 
the record schema.
"

No one is arguing whether it is possible to wrap non-XML content inside 
XML content.

What I am proposing is that the spec provide standard mechanisms for 
returning non-XML content and not leave it up to applications.
Specifically I propose the following 2 mechanisms:

    * For REST Binding use atoms feed/entry/link mechanism to simply
      provide a URL link to the non XML content
    * For SOAP Binding provide a wrapper element definition that servers
      use to wrap binary content in a standard (XOP) based way

This can be accomplished easily and with minimal impact with the benefit 
being that *all* servers return non-XML content (or links to it) in a 
standard interoperable way. How else would a client actually peel apart 
the non-XML content and do something useful with it unless it 
specifically knew what app specific wrapping was used?

--
Regards,
Farrukh