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Non-time-aware services #47

Closed mbtaylor closed 10 months ago

mbtaylor commented 4 years ago

I presume that services are not required to be time-aware.

This is alluded to in section 2.1 "The set of query constraints a cone search needs to understand MUST include the RA, DEC, SR parameters, MAY understand the TIME parameter,..." but glossed over elsewhere.

I think it should be spelled out more explicitly elsewhere how the service is expected to behave if it is not time-aware. How do clients presenting a TIME constraint know if it has been honoured? Should a non-time-aware service treat a time constraint as an error?

The current text in sec 3.1 (VOTable compliant response) mandates a time column in the output table alongside the ID, RA and Dec columns. I agree this should be mandatory where the service has performed filtering based on a submitted TIME parameter, but I would suggest that it should be optional for non-time-aware services. If it's mandatory, non-time-aware services may be tempted to put some dummy value in there.

Bonnarel commented 3 years ago

Mark makes a good point there. Usual behavior of DAL services when they get a query with a PARAM for which they are not aware is an empty response. And I agree that sec 3.1 constraint should be relaxed.

molinaro-m commented 10 months ago

This is not relevant in re-working version 1.1 since it applies to the previous attempt to revision. Closed.