Talk:Version response

From OPeNDAP Documentation
⧼opendap2-jumptonavigation⧽

I think the DAP 3.1 Version response XML should be changes to look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Server-Version>
    <Hyrax version="1.4.0"/>
    <DAP version="3.2"/>
    <BES version="3.6.2" name="bes" prefix"/">
        <module name="hdf4_handler" version="3.7.9"/>
        <module name="netcdf_handler" version="3.7.8"/>
        ...
    </BES>
    <OLFS version="1.4.0"/>
</Server-Version>

Why the condensed form? It's easier to read and holds virtually all the same information. Most 'users' of this will be people, like us, trying to debug a server and interested in the versions of software it includes. For users that are machines, it's easy to write a SAX parser (or use a simple string search) to find the DAP protocol number.

Notes:

  1. The order of the elements at the top-level doesn't matter and neither does the order within the BES element.
  2. The DAP protocol included is the highest version only - most clients will not parse this looking for version numbers since client writers rarely do that stuff and servers SHOULD provide backwards compatibility. In the worst case, a server that advertises DAP 3.2 will return Error responses for a client that says it can only understand a lower version of the DAP (e.g., 2.0).
  3. The current response calls the top-level element OPeNDAP-Version but in reality, it should be Server-Version since this response is about the versions of stuff in a server - it might not be OPeNDAP's server.