VOSI 1.1 initial working draft

[Markus Demleitner]

Hi all,

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 05:02:36PM +0000, Mark Taylor wrote:
> 303 Redirect:
>    I can sort of see the point of issuing a 303 redirect to the
>    ?detail=min endpoint in the case of refusing the full dataset;
>    it gives clients a way to determine whether they have been
[...]
>    So I'd be inclined to suggest dropping this part of the proposal,
>    since it complicates matters without adding much.

+1 from me.  Make that +2.  Actually, I never liked the whole
?detail=min thing anyway -- only the service knows if it's wise to
dump the whole thing or return it in small bits, and the client needs
to be prepared for both ways, too.  As Mark says, it's easy for the
client to figure out which way the service chose by looking at
whether or not the table definitions are empty.

The only advantage detail=min might buy could be backwards
compatibility, and that we cannot fix -- VizieR won't output their
full table schema ever (and shouldn't), and in that case it's still
better if they at least return their table names to the legacy
client.

>    I would suggest instead:
> 
>       tap_url/tables?detail=min  - service must not include detail
>       tap_url/tables?detail=max  - service decides, but client would like detail
>       tap_url/tables             - service decides, client has no preference
>    
>    The service remains free to implement detail=max in the same way
>    as for no detail argument.
> 
>    Having written that ... maybe it's not such a great idea, since it's
>    not intuitively obvious that detail=max should be able to decay to

...and there's no point introducing client control here since clients
will have to implement both ways anyway.

Unless we're willing to go for two-step throughout (and I don't think
that's a good idea since it would break a lot of services), let's
just leave it to the service and tell the clients "If it's an empty
table, retrieve the full table definition from ...tables/<tablename>."

[where I have a slight preference for keeping things in the path part
rather than introducing a parameter, but I really don't care much]

Cheers,

         Markus