Subject: [Ietf-not43] Constructing an all-inclusive <domain> response

From: chris.ambler at enom.com (Chris Ambler)
Date: Tue Oct 14 12:35:01 2003

>It seems fairly trivial to use entity-class + entity-name (or some 
>combination of authority + registry-type + ... depending on your scope) 
>as a key for a hash table of the entities.

Could I trouble you for an example? I'm unclear on how this would look.

>> Would it be possible to define a schema whereby entities can be replaced
>by
>> the actual elements that they would reference? An "I promise that there
>are
>> no circular references and you need not go back to the service for more
>> data" schema, if you will?
>
>In my opinion, this is not a good direction.  Database practices 
>generally tells us that normalization is a good thing.  What you are 
>suggesting makes the relationships less clear when an entity appears 
>multiple times in a response.

I agree, of course. I'm looking towards simplicity over form. Indeed, the
same entity is very often used for multiple contacts. So it would be very
simple to just inject duplicate <contact> elements. But yes, that's not
properly normalized, so I can't argue with you.

But then that means that I put the entity references in there as expected,
use actual or contrived IDs (which will be used solely to reference the
actual data), and include the actual data as part of the payload.

That's where I'm somewhat unclear.

I don't fully grok how or where to properly include the actual data so that
a <domain> element returned is fully-self-contained. Adult supervision?

Christopher