Re: Issue 14.1: Retrieval Subset specification proposal

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 01:19 PM 3/16/2004, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 12:36:34PM -0800, Andy Bierman wrote:
> 
>> The design team discussed the different proposed data subset
>> specification mechanisms discussed in 14.1.1 .. 14.1.5.
>> The more details were discussed the more each feature seemed
>> like a reinvention of some aspect of XPath expressions.
> 
>> The design team suggested that we either do nothing
>> about this issue right now, or bring back the
>> #xpath capability (large devices can implement the optional
>> XPath feature, which is defined outside the protocol
>> specification.  The #xpath capability just means that
>> the agent will support XPath expressions as attributes
>> in the data model content.  The data modelling language 
>> document needs to clarify any further XPath usage requirements.
>
>Not sure I understand the proposal. Does the proposal mean you
>remove <config/> parameter from the <get-config> operation? I
>believe this would be wrong. 

No.  The protocol operations don't change.  The #xpath
capability would just mean that the agent supports
XPath expression attributes in the data model, in a manner 
similar to the 'operation' attribute embedded in the data model.
The actual definition is outside the scope of NETCONF, defined
by the W3C.


>We need something like
>
>        get-config(source, filter)
>
>and I only see the option to leave filter completely undefined
>(saying that the data modeling work has to define how filters look 
>like) or we say that filter is one of the generic XML mechanism 
>(e.g. XPATH) and we later define what the conformance requirements 
>are (where we might want to subset XPATH capabilities in case people 
>really find full XPATH support way too hard to support on their boxes).

I'm leaning towards rejecting this #xpath proposal and any
other proposal to put in place-holders for these loosely
defined features.  Maybe the TBD data modeling WG should say
how XPath is used with NETCONF.


>/js

Andy


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