[Esip-discovery] Discovery Change Proposal 7: Error Handling Best Practices for Discovery Repsonse

[Hua, Hook (388C)]

A more refined DCP-7 is posted for more interoperable error handling.

http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Discovery_Change_Proposal-7


Description:
Current implementations of ESIP Discovery services (OpenSearch, DataCast,
and ServiceCast) have varying error handling behavior in the http
response. Since these micro-standards mostly refer the request/response
format, little has been said about the response format when an error is
encountered.


Problem Addressed:
There is little interoperability in error response handling of these
services. We want to promote a consistent approach to handling errors.

Use case examples for error handling:
*  A request with a custom parameter that is not recognized.
*  An OpenSearch request for a dataset that does not exist. This case is
different from granule-level search with 0 results.
*  A request with an invalid date time entered.

Proposed Solution:
(1) Adopt the W3C HTTP/1.1 Status Code
<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html> response
(2) Handling zero results
(3) Custom error message handling




Will discuss at today's telecon.

--Hook