Re: A DBA perspective.

[Michael Rowley <mrowley@exceloncorp.com>]

Farrukh and I tried to come up with a procedure-based scheme last Friday 
and ran into problems, so that by the time we were out of time, it was 
looking dubious.

> Here's the updated DTD and sample, and 
> a first cut at a list of RIM Procedures and Groups.
> 
> RIM Procedures
> 
> o  Classification
> 
> - getClassifedObjects

Wouldn't you want to be able to get objects that have some specified 
classification.  Then, the next question is how to specify the 
classification.  You could do it by a "geography.asia.japan.tokyo" kind 
of scheme, but you would probably want to be able to have wild cards for 
a level or even for a set of levels.

> o  Association
> 
> - getAssociatedObjects

Is the intent here that you are getting the objects that have been 
associated with a designated object?  Is the designated object the 
source or target?

There are many attributes on associations.  You may want to get all 
associations from a designated source or taget role, or only 
associations of a certain type, etc.  This gets harry pretty fast.

> o  Package
> 
> - get ObjectsByPackage

How would you specify the package.  Packages don't have a global 
name-space do they?

Wouldn't you also want to be able to get the packages that a specified 
object is in?

In general, I believe this approach can work.  The number of procedures 
will be very large and some will be awkward due to a large number of 
parameters that need to be specified.

> 
> The ebXML Registry Ad Hoc Query Accessing 
> 
> Pass an XML command container that consists
> of:
> 
> 1)  Locator + comparitor + (value | valuelist) = query term(s).
> 
>      a) Valid Locators:
> 
>          (i)   A tag name (any path context)
>          (ii)   Tag root path (specific path context)
>          (iii)  A supported Registry Procedure name.
>          (iv)  GUID or UID or URN
>          (v)  "*"   =  match any text  (HTML style on content)

This section confuses me.  By "tag name" do you mean any XML tag name 
(i.e. element name) that exists in the registry?  As soon as you doing 
things along the lines of querying for XML elements whose contents match 
some string, you are practially reinventing XPath.

I would have guessed that if you did not want to use a general purpose 
query mechanism (like XPath) that you would not include queries of 
arbitrary XML elements in the query language.  Instead, I would expect 
you to limit the search to the procedures you mention above, possibly 
with the addition of unstructured keyword searching.

Michael