Alex Little

As I’ve been going through the IMS Enterprise and IMS Enterprise Services spec, I’ve got a number of questions as to how they should be used, or more what they should actually return (this is just a random collection of my queries!)…

1) Should the readPerson method return the persons’ group membership too – or should it only  be the person record?
2) Should the methods which return group memberships return records of people who are implicitly in the group too? By this I mean if there is a parent Group P which contains a child Group C and person A is a directly listed as a member of C (but not of P), if I request all the members of group P, should person A be included? Or should it be up to the requesting system to make iterative calls to get this sort of information?
3) Some of the methods in the Ent Service spec appear to do very similar things, eg the readGroupsForPerson and readMembershipsForPerson both appear to return the same information, admittedly the XML format is different, but essentially the information you are getting from each is the same.
4) It seems a little odd that the formatted name is mandatory, but the component parts of the name are not, I would have thought it ought to be vice versa – as storing and using the component parts of the name is much more common and sensible!
5) There seems to be the potential for the group relationships to get into a loop (I’ve not seem anything yet in the spec that refers to this potential problem), as it seems possible (according to the spec), to have Group A being a member of Group B and GroupB to also be a member of Group A.

The answers to these are probably out there somewhere….!