[MOBY-l] locateServiceByInput - what does "@IN" mean?

[David Block]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Wilkinson [mailto:mwilkinson at gene.pbi.nrc.ca]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 2:48 PM
> To: moby-l at biomoby.org
> Subject: [MOBY-l] locateServiceByInput - what does "@IN" mean?
> 
> 
> The MOBY-Central call "locateServiceByInput" takes a list 
> (should be a list
> reference, actually - I'll fix that) of input Objects as one of its
> parameters.  Should MOBY-Central return only the services 
> which take as input
> *all* Objects in that list, or should it return the services 
> which take one or
> more of the objects in that list?
> 
> Intuitively, I would think it should return just the "all" 
> answer, but when I
> think about it from the Client's perspective, I might want to 
> follow up on only
> one of my object types, rather than limiting myself to only 
> those services
> which take both...
> 
> Is breaking down the objects in-hand a client-side problem, or should
> MOBY-Central deal with it?
> 
> I'm torn...  Personally, I'd prefer to leave it up to the 
> client... that
> certainly makes the query easier ;-)   What do y'all think?

Definitely do SQL magic to find any service that matches any subset of the list of input Objects.  Otherwise, if you have 3 objects, you have to do 7 queries to get all possible object combinations, and it gets worse from there.

"Always be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you emit."

Doing it right on the server end is not all that hard, and if you do the server right, the client is easy.  And you want lots of client implementations.

> 
> M
> 
> 

Good to see this list alive again.  Waiting to see what I can steal :)

--
David Block                    dblock at gnf.org
GNF - San Diego, CA        http://www.gnf.org     
Genome Informatics  /  Enterprise Programming