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Re: Dealing with large collections [Re: URI constraints]


Ezra Cooper wrote:

What's stopping you from having child collections? But yes, in general, we have a query problem.


Robert, how are you suggesting child collections could be used to solve this problem? I'm having trouble picturing a use that would feel 'natural.'

Full blown search as in [DASL] seems a bit heavy for the Atom protocol. The current problem, as I see it, is not "how to search an Atom collection" but "how to specify and return subsets of a collection." Search might be a legitimate function, but out of scope for now, I think.

I fully agree with your assessment of the problem for entries, but I don't think that approach is a natural way to browse for templates, pictures, categories, users, etc.

The response to "max-count" and "since-this-date" would be great in the feed format we have now, along with prev/next. The feed format isn't such a great way to browse for other resources, or to find that entry your wrote in 1999 but haven't modified in ages, especially if I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for.

--entries
   --2004
   --2003
   --2002
   --2000
   --1999
     --sep
       --13

The server would be free to organize this however it wanted (or leave it up to the user... if feeling adventurous...), so if I had written 1000 posts on Sep 13 1999, I might find more collections in there. Does this make sense?



On Oct 11, 2004, at 12:19 PM, Greg Stein wrote:

I'd think that two types of limits would be reasonable: max-count and
since-this-date.




Is there any precedent for using XML element names as the content of an element or attribute? I can imagine a swamp of namespacing issues. Is there a better way to pick out an element?

If you were to think about it from a DAV perspective, you could consider having "WebDAV servers act as a gateway for within-document metadata" [0]. Then you're just matching properties, and not depending on XML elements in the representation. That way, you could also write "property extractors" for an MSWord document, or PDFs, or jpeg EXIF data as well as Atom entries.[1]

Robert Sayre

[0] http://www.franklinmint.fm/blog/archives/000180.html
[1] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-slide/src/share/org/apache/slide/extractor/