[webservices] New ws-station revision released

[Chad Trabant]

Hi Philip,

You make two good points.  Regarding #1 we will better announce upcoming changes to the schema supported by our service, in the future we will likely offer beta versions prior to moving them into production so that client writers such as yourself can test against the updated service.  Regarding #2, we think that's a good idea and we'll raise the issue in the StationXML working group.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Chad

On Jun 23, 2011, at 10:37 AM, Philip Crotwell wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I have 2 requests.
> 
> 1) If the schema for a web service is going to change, please let us
> know before you make the change instead of afterward. If the schema
> changes, then there is a reasonable likelihood that clients will have
> to be changed as well and it is much nicer if there is a little
> warning given.
> 
> 2) Please find a way to version the schemas you use and include that
> in the XML returned from your web services. At least then a client can
> tell if the schema it was coded against is different from the schema
> of the returned xml. I think many places do this by putting a version
> number in the URL of the schema location, so something like this could
> be done for ws-station:
> 
> <StaMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.data.scec.org/xml/station/1.2.3
> http://www.data.scec.org/xml/station/1.2.3/station.xsd">
> 
> I think it is nice to keep old version of the schema around as well.
> It is not unreasonable for someone to store metadata as a stationXML
> document, and without versioning of the schema, a xml file that is
> "valid" one day might become invalid the next just due to schema
> upgrades. It might also be a good idea to put the version of the
> server somewhere, prehaps into the <Module> or <Source> elements.
> 
> As a client writer, I am very concerned about backwards incompatible
> changes that will negatively effect applications that I have released.
> I am happy to see ws-station and stationXML being improved, but
> stability of the schema and managing the upgrade path are important as
> well.
> 
> thanks,
> Philip
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 7:29 PM, Yazan Suleiman
> <yazan at iris.washington.edu> wrote:
>> Hello webservice users,
>> 
>> The DMC has updated it's ws-station service: http://www.iris.edu/ws/station/
>> 
>> For users parsing the StationXML returned by ws-station be aware that <NumberChannels> has been changed to <TotalNumberChannels>.  New elements have been introduced:
>> 
>> TotalNumberStations
>> SelectedNumberStations
>> TotalNumberChannels
>> SelectedNumberChannels
>> 
>> 
>> We have also fixed bugs related to virtual network result sets and timewindow for channel epochs.
>> 
>> For users of the DMC's Fetch scripts no change is required.
>> 
>> regards,
>> Web services team
>> _______________________________________________
>> webservices mailing list
>> webservices at iris.washington.edu
>> http://www.iris.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/webservices
>> 
> 
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