UWS 0.4

[Patrick Dowler]

On 2008-6-13 15:15, Patrick Dowler wrote:
> On 2008-6-6 02:22, Paul Harrison wrote:
> > I have uploaded a new version (0.4) of the UWS document
>
> One more detail about the phase: the user can POST to the phase resource
> with param PHASE=RUN  or PHASE=ABORT to switch to the EXECUTING or ABORTED
> state respectively.

> The values (RUN and ABORT) are verbs, which implies this is an ACTION. They
> are definitely not the new states. I thought in REST that a POST was to
> update/modify, in which case the value submitted should be the new state.
> At least that way, the POST and GET would be symmetric and use the same
> strings and fewer UWS constants would have to be defined.
>
> So it would seem that a POST of the new value would be nicer, eg
> PHASE=EXECUTING or PHASE=ABORTED.

OK, it's friday afternoon, I have a cold, and I am responding to myself :-)

Now that I have noticed the QUEUED phase and it is clear that RUN can put the 
job into either the QUEUED or EXECUTING state. Still, I think PHASE=RUN may 
not be so good.... how about ACTION=RUN since we really are introducing a 
verb here. That at least follows POSTing ACTION=DELETE stylistically.

In the SOAP bindings, there are methods like execute() and abort() and 
destroy()  (aka delete) rather than setPhase()....

> For a GET operation on phase(also applies to termination and destruction):
> should the mimetype of the response be text/plain and just contain a simple
> string (eg caller can just strip the whitspace and parse the value)? Or is
> it in the same form/mimetype as the POST? eg does GET /joblist/job/phase
> return

Doh! I completely skipped section 2.2.1.2 which says I need to be able to send 
HTML (or XHTML) to clients that accept that and XML otherwise. I'll blame it 
on the sinus medication :-)

-- 

Patrick Dowler
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