

What are these attributes for?

Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 10:54:09 +0500
Message-Id: <9606261454.AA11300@www18.w3.org>
To: alex@access.com.au (Alexandre Rafalovitch)
Cc: www-jigsaw@w3.org

Given the subject line, I would suggest you read the
/User/Reference/w3c.jigsaw.resources.HTTPResource.html, which is meant
to answer exactly these question. If you did and didn't find the
answer, then they need to be fixed (I will apply any diff send to me


Alexandre Rafalovitch writes:
 > I can't understand how/where to use those attributes : identifier, title,
 > expires and maxage from HTTPResource, relocate, storeid and icondir from
 > DirectoryResource and filename from FileResource.
 > In details:
 > I do not understand who uses identifier, title and expires.  FileResoure
 > and DirectoryResource don't seem to use it in any way. If anything uses it
 > then what?

identifiers is used as an indexing key in directory resource
stores. It is the URL name of the resource in question, FileResource
allows you to have URL names different then the actual filename. More
precisely, the FileResource first looks at the filename attribute, if
null it uses the identifier attribute as the filename. 

The usage of the identifier is probably hidden by some super-class...

 > I looked through the code of DirectoryResource, but seem to miss the
 > purpose of relocate. Can anybody clue me in on that one?

relocate attribute is used to tell the server if it should relocate
invalid directory URLs: if you ask for /User for example, when
relocate is true, the server will emit a relocation response to /User/
so that relative URLs are correctly computed by the client.

 > Icondir, is that directory within current directory where to find icons? Is
 > that recursive? I mean if there is an icon in icondir use it, otherwise go
 > to the parent and repeat search? Any other behavior?

icondir is not recursive, in general no attribute is recursive since
this would imply some performance penalty, the philosophy of Jigsaw is
to pre-compute as much infos as possible at indexing time, to make
serving time smaller. In this case, I would rather have an icondir
attribute value propagation, for example, at configuration time.

 > Also, FileResource has a attribute filename, does it mean I can have
 > different name of the resource and underlining file? What about title or
 > identier? Aren't they for the same  purpose.

title is not used yet (a bug to be fixed), whenever a title is present
Jigsaw will emit a Title header, and it might also use it in directory

maxage is also unused (as is expires), bugs again. Expires will
probably be droped in favor of maxage (they serve the same purpose,
expressed in different ways).

 > If I am creating my own resources what are the things I should take care
 > of, and what would be handled by the system/editors?

In general, you should only take care of the attributes you define,
the other should be managed by the class that defines them.

 > maxAge and storeId, just have no idea if they are used at all.

storeid is (in directory resources) the filename of the resource
store. You really don't want to change this at that time, but the idea
was to be able to offer two different views of the same space using
different resource stores. Eg one view would be expressed by the
.jigidx files, and another one would be expresssed by some other
(.anotherview) index files. It is not done at tthat time.

Received on Wednesday, 26 June 1996 10:54:21 GMT
