new TAP-1.1 WD released

[Grégory Mantelet]

Hi DAL,

About the TAP-1.1 WD (2017-07-07), I think there is a mistake about the 
description of the deprecated column "size" (of TAP_SCHEMA.columns).

In TAP 1.0:

    *The “size” gives the length of variable length datatypes*, for example
    varchar(256); this size does not map to the VOTable arraysize attribute when the
    latter specifies the size and shape of a multi-dimensional array.

But in this TAP 1.1 WD:

    The "size" column is retained for backwards compatibil-
    ity to TAP-1.0 and must contain the integer value equivalent to arraysize
    when possible and*must be null if arraysize represents a multi-dimensional****or variable-length value*.

I totally agree about the fact that "size" should be NULL when the 
column values are multi-dimensional arrays.
But I do not agree that "size" no longer represents the length of a 
variable-length values (i.e. varchar, varbinary, char and binary).
It does fit with the TAP 1.0 description anymore. It may also confuse 
users/clients when reading old (i.e. TAP-1.0) and new (i.e. TAP-1.1) 
services.

Is it normal? Or should it be fixed?

Cheers,
Grégory
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/dal/attachments/20170802/1ecc427a/attachment.html>