uk.ac.starlink.vo

Interface RegCapabilityInterface

All Known Subinterfaces:

StdCapabilityInterface

public interface RegCapabilityInterface

Describes a service capability interface belonging to a registry resource. This typically provides an access URL at which the service can be found, as well as some other metadata.

This class aggregates a vr:interface and its parent vr:capability, thus conflating the VOResource concepts of Capability and Interface. The Capability:Interface relationship is actually 1:many, but when this class was first written, this relationship was nearly always in practice 1:1, so the arrangement was convenient. With declaration of multiple securityMethod-specific interfaces however, multiple interfaces per capability do actually occur. For backward compatibility reasons the class structure stays the same, so if you want to reconstruct a capability you will have to get all the RegCapabilityInterface instances and group them by standardID.

This class is mainly intended for use in resource discovery (registry interactions). It does not contain all the capability and interface metadata, for instance the security method ID, which behaves differently between RegTAP 1.0 and 1.1. Avoiding such version-dependent items simplifies matters, as long as they are not required for service discovery. Subclasses of this class may be used for more specific capability descriptions used in other contexts, without having to update the resource discovery code.

Note the term "interface" in the javadocs for this class (mostly) refers to the vr:interface element of the VOResource data model, rather than to the java language interface.

Since:

17 Dec 2008

Author:

Mark Taylor

See Also:

VOResource

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
String	getAccessUrl() Returns the access URL for this capability-interface.
String	getDescription() Returns a textual description of this capability.
String	getStandardId() Returns the standard ID which defines what sort of service this capability is offering.
String	getVersion() Returns a version string for this capability-interface.
String	getXsiType() Returns the xsi:type of this capability.

Method Detail

getAccessUrl

String getAccessUrl()

Returns the access URL for this capability-interface. Although VOResource permits multiple accessURLs per interface, that usage is little-used, and deprecated at VOResource v1.1 (in favour of mirrorURL). So implementations should just return a single value here, probably the first one found.

Returns:

capability/interface/accessURL/text()

getStandardId

String getStandardId()

Returns the standard ID which defines what sort of service this capability is offering. This is a URI which may or may not be an IVO ID.

Returns:

capability/@standardID

getXsiType

String getXsiType()

Returns the xsi:type of this capability. Note, this is different from the xsi:type of the interface (this method is not very well named).

This seems to provide similar information to that in the standardId, but these fields are used in different ways by different registries.

Returns:

capability/@xsi:type

getDescription

String getDescription()

Returns a textual description of this capability.

Returns:

capability/description/text()

getVersion

String getVersion()

Returns a version string for this capability-interface.

Returns:

capability/interface/@version