[mb-devel] [WebService] Question about entity IDs and List properties

[Matthias Friedrich]

Hi,

first of all, it's great that MB is finally getting a Java web service
client :)

On Wednesday, 2007-02-21, Patrick Ruhkopf wrote:
[...]
> While the web service returns plain IDs (e.g. "ABCDE"), the parser in the
> python implementation makes full URIs (e.g. Track.getArtist.getId() =
> "http://musicbrainz.org/artist/ABCDE). Why is this?

This is to allow for extensibility on the MMD level, see [1]. This way
we could also use external IDs (from other vendors) and there's still no
special case in the parser because it always rewrites the abbreviated
MusicBrainz URIs to absolute URIs, too.

> Another thing I wonder about is that the sample xml files provided in the
> test folder have offset and count attributes for lists but the web service
> returns them as a comment?!

The web service should return offset and count attributes, too. I
guess that's not a bug, it's rather an unimplemented feature. Feel
free to enter a ticket for this, maybe Rob will fix this soon.

HTH,
	Matthias

[1] http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/MusicBrainzXMLMetaData#head-fab2fc126cd12a10c2d4c514ca015ef254d11d94