jbfaden
commented
1 year ago I've decided the only way to do this reliably is to allow an empty response when the server does not provide an example time range. I'd like to encourage the use of sample time ranges anyway, because scientists are much more quickly able to verify the server works as they expect.
Last summer a student at APL wrote a script which would test HAPI servers for aliveness. This was to replace the ping test I would do with a test which would dig a little deeper into each server but still complete the test within a couple of minutes. The test then would be suitable to run hourly.
I've had a heck of a time dealing with servers which do not provide a sampleStartDate and sampleStopDate. There's really no rules about the startDate and stopDate, which are required, and often requesting the last day of the interval does not return any data. The script would then enlarge the interval and test again, repeating this several times before giving up and declaring the server broken. Because of this I've been unable to reliably run the test, and first I resorted to using fixed hashes (repeating the randomly picked dataset), but even this has been shown to be unreliable.