Re: [wsrp] ExtensionDescription

[Rich Thompson <richt2@us.ibm.com>]

Lets take a very concrete example; I
want to provide additional Contact information regarding instant messaging.
The natural way to do this is to extend the Online structure with an array
of structures, each of which provides a messagingID and a messagingSystem
fields. To take a personal case, I have two home related messaging ids
and one work related messaging id. Forcing these to a top level structure
requires each of these structures also carry a means to declare what it
relates to. I find that unnatural and prone to errors.

I assert the type, meaning and contextual
relationship of the data to the rest of the user profile are all critical.
Lose any one of them and the data becomes virtually meaningless (and often
misinterpreted).

Rich

Subbu Allamaraju <subbu@bea.com>

08/22/05 11:14 AM

To	wsrp <wsrp@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc
Subject	Re: [wsrp] ExtensionDescription

Andre Kramer wrote:
> My fundamental concerns are totally with regards to the definition
of 
> extensions that are outside the scope of WSRP. These, as I understand
> it, are to be carried in <extensions> elements containing an
“any” value 
> and for reason of future evolution and extensibility should be left
open 
> and not described in our protocol IMHO.

This is my concern as well.

The key use case here is to carry some to carry data of unknown type of
a feature described in the spec. In prior discussions, we seem to be 
mixing up "data of unknown type" with extensions. To me, these
are two 
different things.

For this kind of data, we already have the property mechanism, and 
custom profile items can easily be mapped to properties.

So, my proposal would be to add a field to the UserContext.

<complexType name="UserContext">
   <sequence>
     <element name="userContextKey" type="xsd:string"/>
     <element name="userCategories" type="xsd:string"
              minOccurs="0"
maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
     <element name="profile"
             type="types:UserProfile"
minOccurs="0"/>
     <element name="customUserProfileItems"
             type="types:CustomUserProfileItem"
             minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
     <element name="extensions" type="types:Extension"
             minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
   </sequence>
</complexType>

In this proposal, I am intentially ignoring the question of "extending
UserProfile" at each level. That approach seems to be muddying the
waters further, and does not map very well at the conceptual level either.

Regards,

Subbu



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this mail list, you must leave the OASIS TC that
generates this mail.  You may a link to this group and all your TCs
in OASIS
at:
https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/portal/my_workgroups.php