[Cart-users] CART and format of Response from search queries

[Frank K. <fku...@to...>]

Hello,

When requesting search results in COMPACT or COMPACT-DECODED format, the
RETS server is expected to respond with a single <COLUMNS> tag and a
<DATA> tag for each row returned.
Within each of these tags, the columns are separated by the field
delimiter contained in the <DELIMITER> tag. This is all delineated in
section 7.6 of the RETS 1.5 specification.
Logically, there should be the same number of columns in each <DATA> tag
as there are in the <COLUMNS> tag.
But one vendor's RETS server includes an extra delimiter in each <DATA>
tag, resulting in an off-by-one column count in each <DATA> element WRT
the <COLUMNS> element.
Since the extra delimiter as at the end of each <DATA> tag, the column
alignment is not hosed, but the CART library expressly checks the column
count on each <DATA> element and will throw a SAXParseException if there
are too many data columns relative to the <COLUMNS> element.
(SearchResultHandler.endElement() )

My questions:
1. Is this server behavior a violation of the RETS Specification? It
seems that it should be a violation but I can't find it addressed
anywhere.
2. How would you handle this? I have modified CART to log an error
rather than throw an exception in this case, but I'm not sure how much
pressure I should put on the vendor concerning this. IMHO, it's very bad
practice, but if it's not a violation of the specification...

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Frank Kurzawa <fku...@to...>
Topaz Software, Inc.