Simple DataLink question: Can links be relative?

[Mark Taylor]

Tom,

On Thu, 15 Feb 2018, Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1) wrote:

> In a service descriptor  (4.1 in the sDataLink tandard) can I use a relative
> URL to describe the location of the service to be invoked in the accessURL?
> 
> Similarly can relative URLs be used in  a DataLink results table (section 3.2)
> in the accessURL column of  the table?

I don't know if the DataLink authors have an opinion on this, but I
must say I didn't think about the possibility of encountering
relative URLs for these items when I was writing a DataLink client.

Also, I can imagine that users might store a DataLink response for
later use; in that case it would no longer be associated with its
source URL, so reconstructing the absolute URL would be difficult.

So my take would be: no, {links}-response access_url values and
ServiceDescriptor accessURL values should both be absolute URLs.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/