This is an interesting question, and one that I had before. I the answer I got at the time was that individual service providers would publish 'somehow' exactly what capabilities it supported.
Of course what would help out a lot would be a MUST requirement that service providers include in the dcterms:publisher value in the catalog/service provider resource. That way a client could know which specific implementation of the server it was talking to, and adjust its expectations accordingly. I think the safest option for a client is to assume only the MUST features, and then only attempt the SHOULDs/MAYs when it can verify a particular known instance with the provided dcterms:publisher identifier. <jim/> jim conallen Rational Design Manager (DM) Lead Architect, OSLC AM Lead [email protected] Rational Software, IBM Software Group From: Samit Mehta/San Francisco/IBM@IBMUS To: oslc-core <[email protected]> Cc: Pat McCarthy/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, Scott Fairbrother/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS Date: 04/13/2011 05:04 PM Subject: [oslc-core] Question about how clients should handle server's MAY / SHOULD requirements Sent by: [email protected] We have come across at least one requirement (marked as MAY), where it is unclear how an OSLC service consumer client can determine whether an OSLC service provider server supports the requirement or not. Also, it wasn't clear what the service response would be if a server did not support the requirement. Here's the one we ran into: http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OslcCoreSpecification?sortcol=table;up=#Selective_Property_Values . There may be others. The section starts of by saying: OSLC Services MAY support a technique called Selective Properties to enable clients to retrieve only selected property values. It is unclear how a client may determine that a an OSLC service provider supports the oslc.properties and oslc.prefix parameters are supported. Also, is there a specific response that the clients should expect from the server when they are not supported... is there any way to differentiate that response from responses returned in other error scenarios? Regards, ____________________________________________ Samit Mehta mailto:[email protected] IBM Rational Software - Business Development _______________________________________________ Oslc-Core mailing list [email protected] http://open-services.net/mailman/listinfo/oslc-core_open-services.net
