[OAI-implementers] Are URL parameters identifying an OAI repository valid?

[Michael Nelson]

Eric,

Strictly speaking, you should not have extra arguments like:

http://www.domain.com/oai?id=1&verb=identify
http://www.domain.com/oai?id=2&verb=identify

Some clients & servers might let you get away with doing that, but not all 
will.  And you'll appear to have 1 baseURL instead of 2.

It is pretty easy to use something like mod_rewrite 
(http://www.modrewrite.com/) to expose the above urls as:

http://www.domain.com/oai/repo1/?verb=identify
http://www.domain.com/oai/repo2/?verb=identify

this way you have 2 distinct baseURLs and none of the external OAI tools 
get confused, but you could still have 1 script that handles everything.

regards,

Michael

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009, Osisek, Eric wrote:

> 
> Greetings,
> 
> We are building an application which can have multiple OAI repositories accessible
> through the same Java Servelet, and are looking for a way to differentiate between
> them.  Our current thought is to pass a GET parameter in the URL to the Servelet
> indicating which OAI repository to access, but I wanted to confirm that this
> wouldn’t get mixed up in the OAI parameters and thus result in invalid
> repositories.  Our plan would result in URLs similar to the following  for two
> distinct OAI repositories:
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=1
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=2
> 
> Requests to these repositories would then look like this:
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=1&verb=identify
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=2&verb=identify
> 
> Is this valid?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>    Eric Osisek
> 
> 
>

----
Michael L. Nelson mln at cs.odu.edu http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/
Dept of Computer Science, Old Dominion University, Norfolk VA 23529
+1 757 683 6393 +1 757 683 4900 (f)