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Re: Meta-pubs again




The way we've implemented this in Connections is pretty simple and effective. We essentially have the concept of a collection-of-collections -- an atompub collection whose entries each represent a collection. Within each of the atom:entry elements is an app:collection element. Create a new collection by posting an entry. Edit the collection metadata by putting to the edit uri. Each collection has an entry URI and a collection feed URI. We don't have any kind of consistent programmatic way of differentiating the two different kinds of collections but it's not really clear if we actually need one yet.

- James

Tim Bray wrote:

Back in January, I posted about the idea of a "meta-publication", something you can do CRUD on publications or collections. mod_atom needs something like this. Interestingly, several people wrote back and said yes, but there was disagreement on the mechanics. Here some of the plausible options that happen when you POST to a meta-pub:

- create a new collection in the same workspace
- create a new workspace in the same service doc with one or more collections - create a new service doc with one or more workspaces with one or more collections

The reason I'm raising this again is that I'm going to enhance the Ape to test my own implementation (doesn't matter that much which of the above it does) and since this isn't standardized, I guess I'll be doing that in a private fork. If there were sufficient experience and appetite to standardize these semantics, well then, I'd be able to just enhance the Ape.

One could also think of emulating SQL culture: the ISO SQL committee, whenever it was faced with a choice between two options, usually adopted both. You could imagine a new attribute atom:feed@app:meta

<atom:feed app:meta="collection|workspace|service">

depending on which of the above the server would respond to a POST with.

I'm unconvinced at the moment that we're ready to plunge down the standardization path, but I thought it would be polite to ask.

 -Tim