RE: [Cart-users] Compliance Tests

[Jeffery A. B. <jb...@ea...>]

Hello David,

Thanks for your response!  I actually have some good news for you regarding
your issues and our planned compliance testing.

Standard Names support (or lack thereof) has been a big concern in the RETS
community.  As such, compliance tests are requiring that servers support a
defined subset of standard names going forward.  This is already in
progress.

Requiring mapping more fields to standard-xml is the next step after
standard names support.  We are going to doublecheck that standard names
support extends to the mapping of those standard names within the
appropriate standard-xml elements.  

One additional note about COMPACT:  if you are accessing a 1.5 server, it is
required that ALL responses be well-formed XML, i.e., have a content type of
text/xml AND be parsed by an XML parser.  The COMPACT responses from those
servers should be adhering to this or they are already NOT RETS compliant.  

--Jeff


-----Original Message-----
From: David Steinbrunner [mailto:ca...@po...] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 4:22 PM
To: Jeffery A. Brush; car...@li...
Subject: Re: [Cart-users] Compliance Tests

> Hi all,
> 
> NAR has asked Avantia to "raiser the bar" on RETS compliance tests and
we're
> looking for issues from users familiar with RETS Clients and Servers,
which
> we can roll into one of the next rounds of RETS tests.
> 
> The issues that have been recently mentioned on this list include:
> 1. Bad case for capability url keys.
> 2. Undocumented capability url keys.
> 3. Incorrect logout response.
> 4. Bad xml in the search results.
> (This one is tricky to test for as we only see a subset of content.)
> 
> If anyone has anything else they would like to see tested for on the
server
> or client side, please let me know and I'll try to get it added to the
test
> suite.

My company currently has two big issues with RETS.

The biggest would be the lack of support for standard names.  Our client
currently supports two MLS vendors servers which requires us to have large
blocks of code to handle the same data but with different names because of
the lack of standard names or different "standard" names for the same thing
by different vendors.  We are currently looking to add support for more MLS
vendors but do not look forward to having to deal with more inconsistent
naming conventions.

The second is a specific issue with one vendor where results in STANDARD-XML
do not give us all the data fields so we have to use COMPACT. The problem is
that COMPACT is sent as content-type 'text/plain' without encoded data
rather than content-type 'text/xml' with encoded data, as you would expect
from an XML based system.  As with issue 4 above this will make any XML
parser 'blow chunks' unless you add special handling for such cases.

Better compliance tests are greatly needed to make RETS more approachable,
easier to create and maintain.

Thanks for the opportunity to unload that on the list ;-P

-- 
David Steinbrunner
MFM Communication Software, Inc.
http://www.mfm.com