Re: draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00

["Peter Keane" <pkeane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm glad to see hierarchies in an I-D.  I have a few questions:

1. 3.1 states: "The kind of child Feed's metadata identifies the kind
of new Entries that it can accept."  I am not entirely clear what that
means -- is there a mechanism for determining the "kind" of metadata?
Seems like a job for atom:category, and a did see that an example in
7.3 included an atom:category w/ scheme
"http://finance.example.com/cat/kind"; is that, in this case, the
"kind" to which the sentence in 3.1 is referring?

2. 3.1 states: "A master Feed MAY itself be a child of another master
feed."  is that child-master also considered a "detail feed" of it's
parent?  So would that feed be both a detail feed *and* and master
feed? and the entry that defines it both a "master entry" and a
"detail entry?"

3. Can a master entry have more than one detail feed? If so, how does
a client distinguish them?  (perhaps an atom:category child of the
atom:link@rel=detail for each?)

I have a sense that this I-D is aimed primarily at creating a
mechanism for managing feeds with feeds, using atompub, and perhaps
less about creating a generic mechanism for describing sub-feeds in
atom.  Here the master entry is really a convenient atompub capable
(since atompub focuses on entries, not feeds) "wrapper" for a feed w/
in a feed.  Is that an accurate characterization?   A more generic
mechanism for hierarchy in Atom might address multiple sub-feeds for
an atom entry and would likely not require that a feed be labelled a
"master" feed before the fact (i.e., any feed could have entries that
contained other feeds or not, and need not declare that
functionality/purpose up front).  I'm not suggesting this is good or
bad, just want to get a clear understanding of the purpose.

The implementation I work on has need for this exact sort of thing.  I
have addressed it a fairly generic way of allowing an entry to have an
atom:link@rel=service which points to an app:service document that
describes the sub-feeds that this entry has available for posting to
(typically, there is more than one).

--peter keane


On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Nikunj Mehta <nikunj.mehta@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Fellow Atom and AtomPub'bers,
>
> We'd like to discuss the draft below that introduces extensions for Atom and
> AtomPub to deal with hierarchies of feeds and the programmatic creation and
> removal of AtomPub Collections.
>
> This draft defines a mechanism for identifying hierarchical master-detail
> relations among data feeds so that consumer applications can perform
> standard AtomPub operations on them. A hierarchical master-detail relation
> of an Entry to a Feed implies the detail Feed is created when the master
> Entry is created and the Feed is removed when the Entry is removed. The
> Entry is called the "master entry" and the Feed is called "detail feed".
> This relationship allows a client to use AtomPub to create a new Collection
> by posting an Entry to an existing Collection.
>
> Comments?
>
> Colm Divilly & Nikunj Mehta
>
> ==============================================================
>
>   Title        : Hierarchy Extensions to Atom Feeds
>   Author(s)    : C. Divlly and N. Mehta
>   Filename    : draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00.txt
>   Pages        : 18
>
> This I-D is available at the following URL:
>
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/feeds/spec/draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00.html
>
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/feeds/spec/draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy-00.txt
>