arraysize="1" returns to cause trouble

[Patrick Dowler]

If this is in the PR already then we can start using the new xsd sooner
than that without effecting anyone else. In that case, no erratum needed.
I'll look at the PR in detail asap.
--
Patrick Dowler
Canadian Astronomy Data Centre
Victoria, BC, Canada


On Tue, 5 Mar 2019 at 00:29, Markus Demleitner <
msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> Hi Pat,
>
> On Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 03:27:49PM -0800, Patrick Dowler wrote:
> > On Thu, 27 Sep 2018 at 10:45, Patrick Dowler <pdowler.cadc at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > An erratum for VOTable gives some advice on the use and meaning of
> > > arraysize="1" (link:
> > > http://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/VOTable-1_3-Err-3). However,
> > > this conflicts with something in the VODataService-1.2 xsd (line
> 949-ish),
> > > where the arraysize atrtibute in DataType specifies default="1" and the
> > > documentation says that means scalar.
> > >
> > > I consider default attribute values in xsd to be really sketchy because
> > > you cannot round-trip otherwise valid documents and behaviour changes
> if
> > > schema validation is enabled.
> > >
> > > When I read the xml output from a VOSI tables resource I get
> arraysize="1"
> > > even if the xml itself omitted the arraysize (which is what my TAP
> services
> > > are doing). The VOSI-tables and VOTable documents are no longer always
> > > consistent :-(
> > >
> > > Could that default="1" be removed via an erratum?
>
> Whops, sorry, forgot about that one, too.
>
> First, in the current VODataService 1.2 draft
> (https://volute.g-vo.org/svn/trunk/projects/registry/VODataService,
> changed in rev. 5151 of on 2019-09-28), the default is already
> removed.  Here's what the annotation in the current WD says:
>
>    Leave arraysize empty for scalar values.  In version 1.1,
>    this defaulted to 1, which was intended to indicate
>    a scalar.  This is now deprecated; an arraysize of 1 should
>    be avoided now, the future interpretation, in accord with
>    VOTable, will be “array of size 1”.
>
> I suppose that could (perhaps after taking out a bit of
> breathlessness) be straightforwardly backported to VODataService 1.1
> in an erratum.  Eyeballing the document, changes would propagate to
> about five places in the prose (and a few more if we wanted to fix
> some language on @delim that will become confusing with this change).
> Not pretty, but doable.
>
> I'd reluctantly write the erratum if asked to do so.  As an
> alternative, I'd offer to have a PR of VODataService 1.2 by Paris,
> now that it seems that there's no great interest in rich column
> metadata in the community.  I suppose that we *could* have sufficient
> implemenation by Groningen to make it REC then.
>
> Or... what about a deal?  I'll write the erratum for at least one
> promise to do reference implementations of the new VODataService 1.2
> features before Groningen.  Who's in?
>
>           -- Markus
>
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