RE: Yet more issues to resolve - <persistDuration>

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Prasad Yendluri asked why PersistDuration (in the CPA/CPP) is limited to
"days"? David Burdett replied that:

   ...if the message is being placed in some type of persistent
   storage such as a disk, then you probably would not want to
   clear it out too often. So setting it to whole days makes it
   a simpler value than the years, months, weeks, days, hours,
   minutes, millisecs?? that you might otherwise need. Another
   approach is to specify a single integer and then put the
   units in separately such as

      <persistDuration units="seconds">20</persistDuration>

   in the CPA. Would that work better?

Maybe everything that smells like a "duration" should really be one
(i.e., a Schema "xsd:timeDuration" type), as noted for <TimeToLive> in
my comments on Spec Version 0.9a at
http://lists.ebxml.org/archives/ebxml-transport/200012/msg00253.html.
Then we would have complete freedom to specify days, hours, minutes, or
any combination thereof.   Using the ISO 8601 Duration, e.g., PT10H20M
for 10 hours - 20 minutes, would be instantly recognizable the world
over with no mess, no fuss and no ambiguity. (Hee, hee - just kidding -
but it IS a standard!).  Then David can persist for seconds or days,
depending on his whim, without burdening the CPA with decisions about
what is reasonable, or having to invent new time unit parameters.  See
the submission by Martin Bryan, "Datatyping for Electronic Data
interchange - Draft CEN/ISSS Workshop Agreement," at
http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/ec/Datatyping/data99_000.htm, for a
description of schema timeDuration types.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
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