[MOBY-l] Retrieving multiple classes and class-types

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all!

Matt and I had a discussion last night regarding MOBY queries which
retrieve more than one result from a class, or worse yet more than one
type of class.

I'll tackle the latter first, based on what I remember from the MOBY-DIC
meeting:

As I recall, there was only one type of query that would return multiple
class *types*, and that was "KeywordSearch".  I see no problem with
expecting a client to deal with this one exception...  or am I missing
something?

    $service->KeywordSearch(keyword => @words)

seems a reasonable way to make this query.  Defining the structure of
the KeywordSearchResponse will be fun though!  heh heh heh....  We
should make that the punishment for MOBY offenses!!

w.r.t. retrieving more than one result of a certain class:  I also see
no problem with this, provided that we stick to the "rule" that triples
in a MIB **must** point to a *single* piece of data.  Otherwise, clients
should expect to receive more than one result for each query, and if
they get only one then so much the better :-)

Am I being naiive here?

M


--
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"Speed is subsittute fo accurancy."
________________________________

Dr. Mark Wilkinson
Bioinformatics Group
National Research Council of Canada
Plant Biotechnology Institute
110 Gymnasium Place
Saskatoon, SK
Canada