Re: Technical comments

[christopher ferris <chris.ferris@east.sun.com>]

Gary,

Please see below.

Cheers,

Chris

"Morin, Gary" wrote:
> 
> (1)
> 8.5.3 ConversationId
> 
> I really dislike the fact that we are leaving this open to be totaly
> implementation dependent.  I'm not fond of this element in the first place
> but if we do really need it this is a place that will drive people crazy in
> actual implementation.
> 
> How about "recomending" something like we see in the example.
> 
> We RECOMEND that the content of the ConversationID string be a list of
> MessageID the other messages included in the conversation seperated by a
> delimiter.  The delimiter MUST be the first character of the string.

This isn't how the ConversationId element was intended to be used
at all. In many if not most cases, the MessageIds of the messages
in a conversation are not known a priori. Indeed, one cannot know
in advance the MessageIds that your partner will use in advance!

The ConversationId is meant as a "key" that associates messages
that are related in some way, typically the set of messages that
will be exchanged between parties in the execution of an instance
of a business process transaction (e.g. po, po-conf, ship notice,
invoice,
payment notice all related to the original po). In this case, the
ConversationId *could* be the po#. Or, it could be generated by the
software as a unique identifier that is used to associate the
related messages to the conversational state maintained by your
software.

> 
> (2)
> General ponderings
> 
> How much trouble are these "public" URI/URL's... we are mandating for those
> of us who may not use the Public Internet for this stuff?  It is posible,
> even likley, that an automotive OEM or supplier MSH will be on the ANX and
> may not even be able to see the Internet.

A URI is just a string that uniquely identifies something universally.
From RFC 2396: 

	A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact string of characters
   	for identifying an abstract or physical resource.

In practice, many URIs are expressed as a URL which can resolve to
the object identified using the scheme part of the URI. However, a
URI does NOT need to be resolvable using Internet protocol scheme
mechanisms (e.g. http, ftp, gopher, etc.) the scheme 'uri:' or
(if the URI is a URN) 'urn:' may be used. 

Again, from RFC 2396:

	Although many URL schemes are named after protocols, this does not
   	imply that the only way to access the URL's resource is via the
named
   	protocol.

I would strongly recommend that you read/review RFC2396 for all the gory
details.

> 
>   -- Gary
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