Re: [Tools-discuss] better access to ipr notifications?

[Henrik Levkowetz <henrik at levkowetz.com>]

Hi Simon,

On 2008-02-20 01:39 Simon Josefsson said the following:
> On 20 feb 2008, at 00.37, Henrik Levkowetz wrote:
...
>> I've done some work on a table-format prototype,
>>  (http://merlot.tools.ietf.org:31415/ipr/list-specific/)
>> but for your purpose XML or CSV would maybe be better?  Would you  
>> like to
>> propose a format?
> 
> Sure!  What kind of information is actually stored in the database?   
> The html pages are somewhat opaque, and it isn't clear to me if each  
> field has its own database column, or whether all ipr information (in  
> html) for a particular id is stored as one big entry.

Each field has its own column.  Since the code for the part of the
datatracker which is implemented in Django is openly available, the
easiest thing for me is to point you to the file which defines the
Django interface to the IPR database table.  I realize this is not
necessarily the easiest for you, but it will give you pretty complete
data ;-)

In this python file, each class which extends 'models.Model' defines
an object class corresponding to a table, and each attribute corresponds
to a column.  Hope you can take it from there.  (Oh, and it isn't
necessarily pretty -- we have a database schema cleanup waiting to
happen...):

http://www3.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/browser/branch/2.00/ietf/ipr/models.py

> As for xml or csv, I don't have a strong preference.  If html code is  
> stored in the database, xml will be rather ugly.
> 
> If you give an example of a database row for one ipr notification, I  
> can suggest some text format for it.  Are you using a sql database?

Yes, it's an sql database, but there's multiple rows involved in just
one notification.

> A big question for me is also whether the information is immutable,  
> or whether each ipr notification can be modified.  This affects  
> whether I need to mirror all ipr information every time, and time  
> stamp it, or whether I can just look for new id's.  It seems right  
> now that notifications can be modified in the sense that they can be  
> deleted.  I wonder if these kind of questions may be answered by any  
> IETF IPR policy document.

Don't know about a policy document for this, but you're right in that
the interface is done so that people submitting a notification have to
submit a new one in order to change things; the notifications aren't
modified once they have been entered.


	Henrik
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