Request for clarification - multiple payloads

[David Marshall <dmarshall@vmguys.com>]

This is a request for clarification as regards the 0.8 TR&P
specification:

<background>I'm working on the infrastructure committee for the
OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) where we are soon to publish our next level
spec. One of the major areas of revision in this spec. is in the area of
infrastructure where we are have begun the process of ebXML alignment by
adopting the packaging portion of the TR&P spec.

In future revisions of our spec we anticipate moving to full adoption of
TR&P, though there will be at least one more major spec revision before
this is possible (for historical and timing reasons).</background>

<requirement>In the OTA we need to send at least two payload documents
within each ebXML message envelope.</requirement>

<requestForClarification>
Referring to section 7.1 of the 0.8 spec., the message structure diagram
implies a single ebXML payload envelope containing one or more payload
documents.

Section 7.4 states "If the ebXML Message contains a payload, then a
single ebXML Payload Container MUST be used to envelop it."

What happens if the document contains two or more payloads? Is there
either:

a) a new boundary and set of MIME headers for each subsequent payload
(i.e. each payload forms a subpart of the enveloping multipart/related
envelope

or

b) a new multipart/related MIME envelope which represents an overall
payload container with each payload representing subparts within this
nested envelope (this appears to be what's implied in the message
structure diagram in section 7.1).
</requestForClarification>

<opinion>
option a) above seems conceptually simpler in my opinion and I haven't
been able to think of anything that would break if multiple payloads
were handled this way rather than via option b). Either way, it would be
useful to spell it out in future revisions of the spec (a multipart
payload example in the appendix would be nice too).
</opinion>

tia,

David Marshall

--
David Marshall       mailto:dmarshall@vmguys.com
VM Systems, Inc.           http://www.vmguys.com