Subject: [Simple] A requirement on retrieving "List of Lists" using XCAP

From: "Nilo Mitra (NY/EMX)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 08:30:50 -0500

Hello all:
Some of you may know that the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is strongly considering using the IETF work on XCAP as the means for a subscriber to access and manage his contact lists, communications groups and other session-related policies. In the course of analysing such requirements, it seems that it would be very useful to support the retrieval of a list of lists (documents) showing the "directory" of the user's various lists (documents). 

Such situations arise when a user needs to retrieve the data related to his contacts and policies stored in the network because:
1) The user has changed to a different terminal and wants to make the above-mentioned content available on the new terminal, or
2) The user has for some reason deleted the information in the terminal. Therefore, he needs a way of finding what is data is stored in the network and re-populating his terminal with that data.

To do the above, the user's terminal needs to be able to fetch the list of his documents available on the XCAP server. However, this support is missing in the current draft of XCAP, draft-ietf-simple-xcap-02.txt. The current specification does not describe how a list of lists shall be handled, as XCAP defines how to store one XML document and how to manipulate it. It does not cover how the user finds the paths to already stored documents.

Are there any plans for supporting such a requirement in the next draft of XCAP?

In anticipation that you may have already considered such a requirement, here are some additional thoughts on the subject:

Because in a deployment it is possible that different network elements can host certain types of list, it seems best from  a coordination point of view if there exists one list of list per type of list or service. IOW, there is no need to keep a master list of lists for per-user information in the entire domain.

Moreover, it is also likely that there will be terminals that do not support or needs all types of per-user data, particularly if such terminals support applications or services that do not need such data. Thus, it should be possible to only access and retrieve the data that is needed.

If we apply this to XCAP, this means that there should be one list of lists per AUID. 

So one proposal is that XCAP specification defines a way to fetch the list of XML documents stored in a XCAP server. We suggest that the list of lists is returned as a resource list, and that the following method is used:    
 "GET   http://xcap.example.com/services/<AUID>/users/<username>/ HTTP/1.1" 
to fetch such an XML document. As base for the schema of the XML document the xs:schema targetNamespace = "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:resource-lists" is proposed,  i.e., it is a resource list with XCAP URIs as entries.

Thoughts? Comments?

Regards,
Nilo 

Nilo Mitra
Ericsson, Inc.
desk: +1 212 843 8451
mobile: +1 516 476 7427  

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