Re: [wsrp] ExtensionDescription

[Subbu Allamaraju <subbu@bea.com>]

Rich Thompson wrote:
> 
> 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).

Contextual relationship is not required in every possible custom profile 
item. When required, such information can easily be described/encoded 
the  contextual relationship with other items. Instead of solving this 
in the spec, we can let the owner of custom profile items solve it.

Subbu


> 
> Rich
> 
> 
> *Subbu Allamaraju <subbu@bea.com>*
> 
> 08/22/05 11:14 AM
> 
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> 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
> 
> 
> 
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