Re: CAP 13: Bad CAL-QUERY example / description?

[email protected] Thu, 3 Jun 2004 17:30:47 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.calendar
Message-ID <OF23670224.7F59D0C8-ON85256EA8.007454E3-85256EA8.0076065D@notesdev.ibm.com>
Doug replied on 06/03/2004 04:38:51 PM:
> > So I guess the question of usefulness arrises from this.  Whats the 
> > use of (c) if it has the undesirable effect of bleeding multiple 
> > VALARMs into 1 big mush of properties?  (The same can be asked of 
> > Mikes SELECT VEVENT.* FROM VAGENDA example...)
> 
> The example shows you what you get if you do that, for what ever reason 
> you might want it.
> I would agree that in most cases that is not what you want.

Out of curiosity, can anyone describe a case when you would want this 
(VEVENT.* or VALARM.*) as opposed to no ".*"?  If so, is it one we would 
see often?  If not, why did we have this feature?

> It answers the quetion, what property names are in any VEVENTs in my 
> calendar.
> If that is usful :-)

If thats the sole benefit / usage then I sure wish that there would be a 
much simpler and faster way than having my poor CUA sort thru all the data 
in my calendar using a brute force linear scan while cloging up my LAN and 
keeping the CS busy streaming all that mush.  %^|

Given that there is an example describing this already:

   SELECT VALARM.* FROM VEVENT WHERE UID = "123"

   Will return all of the properties in each "VALARM" component
   in the matching "VEVENT" component:

   TRIGGER;RELATED=END:PT5M
   REPEAT:4
   ...
   TRIGGER;RELATED=START:PT5M
   DURATION:PT10M
   ...
   ...

Id like to suggest we update the paragraph above to indicate that using 
VALARM.* (or any WIDGET.*) with multiple VALARMs (WIDGETs) is not 
particularly useful or that the results could not be accurately 
interpreted because the bounding wrappers are missing.  Something like:

   Will return all of the properties in each "VALARM" component
   in the matching "VEVENT" component.  If there are multiple
   "VALARM" components then the results will be an mix of all
   "VALARM" properties in one incoherent stream of data such as:

Finesse it as you will but the point is to indicate that amalgumated 
results are not really useful as there is no way to safely rebundle them 
up in any meaningful way.  Perhaps that kind of text would belong to the 
#7 bullet item text just above the example instead...

Bruce
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