SRU VERSION 1.1 ARCHIVE

SRU Explain Operation

Request Parameters - Response Parameters - Example

The Explain record serves to record facilities available at an SRU server. It is used by clients to self-configure. The record is in XML and follows the ZeeRex Schema (also used for describing Z39.50 servers) described in general at http://explain.z3950.org/. and specifically for SRU at http://explain.z3950.org/srw/.

There are two methods for getting the explain record.

Via the SRU Explain Operation.
http GET request at the base URL for the service (no parameters). This can be considered an SRU request (and hence have a default recordPacking of 'xml'), with no extraRequestData and leaving it up to the server to determine the version of the response. Otherwise, the response is identical to an SRU explainResponse message.

Request Parameters

Parameter Name	Mandatory or optional	Description
version	Mandatory	The SRU version.
recordPacking	Optional	How the explain record should be escaped in the response, 'string' or 'xml'. The default is 'xml'.
stylesheet	Optional	A URL for an xml stylesheet. The client requests that the server simply return this URL in the response.
extraRequestData	Optional	Provides additional, profile specific information. See Extra Data.
operation	Mandatory	The string: 'explain'.

Response Parameters

Name	Type	Mandatory or Optional	Description
version	xsd:string	Mandatory	The SRU version of the response. Must be less than or equal to the version requested by the client.
records	record	mandatory	a single Explain record (as shown in the example below).
extraResponseData	xmlFragment	Optional	Additional, profile specific information See Extra Data.

SRU Explain Example

The following URLs all produce the explain document.

http://myserver.com/myurl/?operation=explain&version=1.1&stylesheet=http://myserver.com/myStyle
http://myserver.com/myurl/?
http://myserver.com/myurl/

The corresponding response from the server would be:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://myserver.com/myStyle"?>
< srw:explainResponse xmlns:srw="http://www.loc.gov/zing/srw/"
   xmlns:zr="http://explain.z3950.org/dtd/2.0/">
      <srw:version>1.1</srw:version>
      <srw:record>
           <srw:recordPacking>XML</srw:recordPacking>
           < srw:recordSchema>http://explain.z3950.org/dtd/2.0/ </srw:recordSchema>
           <srw:recordData>
               <zr:explain>
                   < zr:serverInfo wsdl="http://myserver.com/db" protocol="SRU" version="1.1">
                        < host>myserver.com</host>
                        <port>80</port>
                      <database>sru</database>
            </zr:serverInfo>
           <zr:databaseInfo>
               <title lang="en" primary="true">SRU Test Database</title>
               < description lang="en" primary="true"> My server SRU Test Database </description>
        </zr:databaseInfo>
      <zr:metaInfo>
           < dateModified>27-11-2003</dateModified>
      < /zr:metaInfo>
      ...
    </zr:explain>
</srw:recordData>
</srw:explainResponse>

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