Re: Credential DELETE Operation

  Hi Gareth,

I agree -- there appears to be little advantage to overloading the 
UPLOAD operation as currently described.

Beyond that, it's important to limit the possibility of unintended 
DELETE-ALL operations since recovering from that type of error would 
likely be painful.

That could be done with a command modifier.  Alternatively, it might be 
simpler to reserve a credential name that always means "all credentials" 
and use that to specify DOWNLOAD-ALL and DELETE-ALL operations.

Regards,

Dale Gustafson


Richards, Gareth wrote:

>In the current ID, credentials are deleted using the UploadRequest.  
>
>According to section 2.2.1:
>
>a) If the UploadRequest contains no Credential and the UploadRequest
>contains a "Delete="yes"" attribute, then the all the credentials associated
>with that account are deleted. 
>
>b) If the new credential from the UploadRequest contains no PayLoad field
>and the new credential has a "Delete="yes"" attribute, then the (one and
>only) "matching" credential is deleted. 
>
>One minor point is that in the current schema the Payload is not an optional
>element in the CredentialType and this appears to be required to allow the
>second delete to occur.  
>
>However, it may be simpler to implement the DELETE operation described in
>Section 3.3 of the framework document with a separate DeleteRequest rather
>than overloading the UploadRequest in the way described.  One possibility
>would be for the DeleteRequest PDU to be either empty or contain an
>CredentialSelector and optional LastModified.  If it is empty then it is a
>request to delete all credential otherwise it is a request to delete a
>specific credential.
>
>This would have a number of advantages:
>
>1) There would be no need to have a Delete attribute in the CredentialType.
>
>2) There would be no need to have an optional Payload since the only time a
>Credential can meaningfully not contain a Payload is if the Delete attribute
>is set to "yes" and it is contained in an UploadRequest.
>
>3) The UploadRequest PDU could be simplified by removing the Delete
>attribute and making the Credential mandatory.  
>
>4) The conditions on the use UploadRequest given in section 2.2.1 would be
>simplified.
>
>
>  
>