Subject: [weirds] Comments on draft-hollenbeck-weirds-rdap-search

From: Jean-Philippe Dionne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:20:41 -0500

Hi All,

Here are my comments on the rdap search draft.

Regards
Jean-Philippe

---

From: Andy Newton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 03:25:50 +0000

>Here are my comments on the rdap search draft.

Jean-Philippe,

Thanks for the review. Below are my comments:

Section 2:
> <JPD>
> With Internationalized domain names, the situation of being unsure of
>the exact
> spelling will be exacerbated.  In section 4, we can read:
> "This document does not specify partial matching processing rules for
>Unicode or
> DNS u-label matching."
>
> This document is the right place to cover the problem of searching IDN
>records and internationalized string in
> general.
> </JPD>

The point of this is that such rules are locally defined. Scott and I are
looking at issues with Unicode and not finding good references for doing
substring searches and partial matching. If you know of existing practices
or standards in this space, we would be very interested in re-using them
if possible.

Section 3.2:
> <JPD>
> Is there a mendatory one-to-one mapping between the parameter name in the
> search url and the property name in the json response?  e.g.:
> - /entities/?name=<pattern> matches the "name" property in the json
>response.
> - /entities/?handle=<pattern> matches the "handle" property in the json
>response.
>
> I also propose an alternative way of searching by using a json template
>in a
> POST request. e.g:
>
> POST /entities
> {
> "rdapConformance" :
> [
> "rdap_level_0"
> ],
> "name": "NET-RTR-*",
> }
>
> This has the advantage of reusing the json response format as a template.
</JPD>

That's a very interesting approach. At the moment I don't think it offers
any capabilities over query parameters but I see the potential if
complexity is added where JSON would be a better serialization than query
parameters.

Section 3.3:
> <JPD>
> 3.3 Search based on date.
> Are there use cases for search based on dates?  Such as the Whowas
>service
> provided by ARIN?  I guess this could be described in a separate
>document.
> </JPD>

I think WhoWas services should be separate from the WEIRDS effort. ARIN's
implementation isn't a real-time service specifically because of the
amount of data involved and the special acceptable use policy around the
service.

Section 5:
> <JPD>
> Server policies will require the servers to limit the number of search
>results
> returned.  How will the client be notified about this?  Does the server
>returns
> an error or a partial result list?
> 
> The client can be notified by a 20x status code and/or with a notice in
>the json
> response.
> </JPD>

My first inclination is to use JSON but I haven't thought about this very
much. A 20x code might be the right thing to do. Do you have specific
recommendation?

Thanks for the review.
-andy