RE: [search-ws] Scan as a query type

["Matthew J. Dovey" <m.dovey@jisc.ac.uk>]

> My intuitive feel is that scan would map very nicely to a query. Note
> that the result of the query could be a very specialized record that
> contains all that is necessary
> to provide an adequate scan response. Such a specialized record would
> still be contained in the the standard response wrapper format we
> choose
> (e.g. ATOM 1.0)

In general, I agree with this - although it should be noted that the
type of query needed for a scan would be a single query term, not
involving any Boolean operators at all (this is how the current scan
operation works).

However, this is a slightly different question to whether scan should or
shouldn't be a separate operation.

Let use assume (for now) that we can use same request format for scan as
we use for search, and that we can also use the same response format for
both (using a special record format for index terms).

We would still need to somehow indicate to the server whether the
request is a normal search or an index scan. As far as I can tell, there
are three ways to do this:

i) have two distinct operations with the same request and response
formats
ii) have a flag in the request to indicate whether we are searching the
full database or an index
iii) have a flag in the query itself (as per Ray's suggestion) to
indicate whether we are searching the full database or an index.

My preference is (i)

Matthew