On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Tom Oinn wrote: > Damian Smedley wrote: > > > What is the usual approach taken in webservices to keep track of name > > changes in external software? Presumably just hoping people don't change > > them is not the approach being taken as that is doomed to failure. Is > > there some sort of format to represent the old->new name mappings that > > people typically use? > > There isn't a way of coping with it, if the names / schema / signature > of methods etc change you're screwed as a client. There's no reason I > can see for the internal names to change anyway, the user visible names > haven't changed so in this case it seems entirely unwarranted, who does > it help?
it was to help people using the API directly in scripts or through their own Query XML rather than a nice GUI like Taverna. These all use the internalNames of attributes and filters so it helps if they match the displayNames (with underscores instead of spaces etc) > > I know it's not a property of biomart as such, it's a property of the > way biomart is used but it's still an important point - we now have > clients which can store queries, those stored queries should be made as > stable as possible. There is nothing we can do about this, if we have a > query stored and we try to apply it to the data set after the metadata > has changed the query will be broken, end of story. > hmmm - seems like there should be a way of webservices deployers giving mappings between versions to support this type of thing. I can't really see how any sort of storage of queries is going to work, especially in teh biological community :) We find it hard to maintain stability just within biomart, if you have a pipeline involving several external resources would have thought things get unmanagable cheers Damian > Cheers, > > Tom >
