[csw-maintainers] Catalog checks via REST

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2012/1/15 Peter Bonivart <bonivart at opencsw.org>:
> I'm not talking about pushing the catalogs, I'm talking about getting
> info about a bad upload during the upload, the same thing you have
> brought up earlier.

So you're talking about synchronous checks.

> If the database contained everything needed for a catalog to be
> generated directly from it one could be created temporarily, checked
> by chkcat and the result could be returned to csw-upload-pkg. With the
> new chkcat I think this could be done in 1-2 seconds per catalog max.

It depends on the database performance, it could be more than only 1-2
seconds. The performance of a normalized database is usually worse
than performance of cached data or denormalized database. I wouldn't
like to denormalize ours - denormalizing adds complexity and makes
code maintenance harder. The other option is caching.

> This has nothing to do with the actual creation of official catalogs,
> they could still be generated from a cron job.

I plan to update the database schema and add more fields to the
tables. I try to keep the number of tables and number of fields to the
minimum (less code to maintain!), but I'll make sure that we in the
next revision the database has enough information directly in the
tables (as opposed to pickled objects). But I've been planning to do
that for maybe a year now and there was always something for me to do
which was more urgent. If you feel strongly about this and really want
to see this happen soon, you need to take it on yourself.

Maciej