#6 Meaning of "default_element_set_name"

[Anonymous]

Hello jzkit-Team,

I try to use your Toolkit in order to query in Z39.50
resources.

It works very fine - but I do not understand the
meaning of "default_element_set_name"
and "full_element_set_name" - and over all, I really do
not know, which of the values "b | B | f |F |..." I have to
put in. So I just try one of them - till it works.

Do you have a documentation or a rule for them?

Thank you very much,
Phuong Heise.

[Ian Ibbotson]

Logged In: YES
user_id=88018

Hi.

Always good to hear from a new user. Element set names are a
pain, and something that have been significantly re-worked
in JZKit2 with the idea of record arechetypes, but that
won't help here :(

The basic problem is that different servers understand
different values for element set name. Some understand "F"
for full records, whilst others expect "f". The same happens
with brief. Some servers even crash when you send the wrong
one. :(. Some severs support special ones such as the
Archival systems supported by Cheshire.

Default Element Set name is used (a) when sending a search
request and specifying a record syntax for piggyback records
and (b) when trying to retrieve records for display in a
hitlist (For example, when you use a result set iterator by
default, the iterator will use default element set name).

FullElementSetName is used when asking for Full format
records. It's most often used at the application level to
ask the result set to supply records in full format.

In essence, set default to whatever your server understands
for brief records "B" or "b", set full to "F" or "f". If
your records are all reasonably small, I'd suggest just
setting everything to F to save round trips to the server,
but that's an optimisation that needs to be assessed on a
case-by-case basis (Premature optimisation being the root of
all evil, as we know ;)).

Hope that helps?

Ian.