[OAI-implementers] Empty ResumptionToken

Alan Kent ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au
Mon, 8 Jul 2002 11:39:30 +1000


On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 12:16:51PM +0100, Tim Brody wrote:
> <rant>
> noRecordsMatch should not be an error (and I'll keep saying it until
> doomsday)

For what its worth, I will agree with you until doomsday too.
Its not that hard to work around, but its conceptually quite wrong
to me too. Our solution was in our error processing code to put
in a special case to ignore that error as if it never occurred.

> an empty resumptionToken is just plain wrong ("The format of the
> resumptionToken is not defined by the OAI-PMH and should be considered
> opaque by the harvester", but OAI-PMH would appear to "define" an empty
> resumptionToken - as Homer puts it, "Doh!".)

I thought the reason for allowing resumptionToken to have empty content
was so that the attributes of the element could always be present:
expirationDate, completeListSize, cursor. That is, so the last request
was not a special case where these attributes would be missing.

> </rant>

So when is work on 2.1 starting? :-) :-) :-)
Alan

-- 
Alan Kent (mailto:ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au, http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/~ajk/)
Project: TeraText Technical Director, InQuirion Pty Ltd (www.inquirion.com)
Postal: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001.
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