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

[Simeon Warner]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 04:52:08PM -0400, Gary McGath wrote:
> 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
>
> I can't see anything in the OAI-PMH spec that excludes URL parameters other 
> than those which the protocol knows about, but some clients might have 
> trouble providing such URLs.

I think the intention was that addition arguments are not
permitted. The badArgument error condition is described thus:

"badArgument -- The request includes illegal arguments, is missing
required arguments, includes a repeated argument, or values for
arguments have an illegal syntax."

[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#ErrorConditions]

Cheers,
Simeon



> Is there a reason why you don't want to treat these as sets?
>
>
> -- 
> Gary McGath
> Digital Library Software Engineer
> Harvard University Libraries, Office for Information Systems
>
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