Replication for Jan demo

[Tony Linde]

I'd like to suggest a simple registry replication method for the Jan demo
and that we leave harvesting to a later time (allowing individual projects
to trial different methods and report back).

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The proposal is that every registry service must support the following
method (and its polymorphics) in its signature:

harvest(datetime Since, string TypeList)
harvest(datetime Since)
harvest(string Type)
harvest()

This will return a document which conforms to the schema (0.8.2 or whatever
we decide upon) containing all the resources registered since a certain
date/time (or all of them if missing) and of certain types (or all types if
missing). The Type string is a comma separated list of types.

I would suggest that the list of resource types be based upon the schema
element names and that selecting a higher level type (eg Service) will
return all the resource types derived from that (eg SkyService).

Only resources 'owned' by a registry will be returned except...

The resource types Registry and Authority will always be returned whether
they are named in the type list or not and all such resources will be
returned whether 'owned' by the registry or not.

It will be up to each database to maintain timestamps on its resources so as
to service these methods.
==========

How does this sound?

Cheers,
Tony. 

__
Tony Linde                       Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292
AstroGrid Project Manager        Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311
Dept of Physics & Astronomy      Mobile: +44 (0)7753 603356
University of Leicester          Email:  ael at star.le.ac.uk
Leicester, UK   LE1 7RH          Web:    http://www.astrogrid.org