Subject: ORDERPATCH in the Advanced Collections Specification

From: "Slein, Judith A" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 09:59:27 -0400

At IETF 42, the question was raised:  What is the rationale for allowing
only one change to an ordering per ORDERPATCH request?

I believe that the rationale for this decision was that there may be
existing DMSs that support only single changes per request, and that we
should not require them to change in order to be compliant with the
Ordering part of the Advanced Collections specification.

We can certainly change this position if the consensus of the group is
that it is too restrictive.  An intermediate position might be that we
define the ORDERPATCH request to support multiple changes per request,
but don't require servers to accept requests with more than one change.

Judith A. Slein
CR&T/ADSTC
[email-masked]
8*222-5169

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From: Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 10:59:27 -0700

> Ordering part of the Advanced Collections specification.

That these systems don't natively support multiple order changes per request
isn't necessarily sufficient reason to prevent multiple requests from being
submitted in an ORDERPATCH.  Since the semantics of ORDERPATCH are being
implemented by some DAV layer, rather than directly by the document
management system, it is quite possible that the DAV layer could implement
multiple order changes per ORDERPATCH even if the document management system
can't perform this functionality in a single operation.

In fact, since WebDAV servers support locking a collection (to implement
LOCK), a DAV layer could lock the collection, then perform multiple
individual order change operations, then unlock the collection.  It might be
difficult to implement all-or-nothing semantics with this approach (i.e.,
perform all these order changes or perform none of the order changes), which
is why I suggest making the semantics best effort.

- Jim

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 13:23:09 -0700

Jim Whitehead wrote:

> Since the semantics of ORDERPATCH are being
> multiple order changes per ORDERPATCH

Right--and (IMHO) this would be much better than forcing the clients to do it
instead.  The server can fake it more efficiently than the client can (if the
client has to issue one ORDERPATCH per change), and some servers won't have to
fake it at all.

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