[seek-dev] EcoGrid Query and problems with pubDate

[Steve Tekell]

My concern isn't simpy that pubDate wasn't being properly type casted, but
that it's type was ambiguous and couldn't be cast to anything other than a
string without creating some problems.  


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Jones [mailto:jones at nceas.ucsb.edu] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 4:13 PM
> To: Steve Tekell
> Cc: seek-dev at ecoinformatics.org; 'Duane Costa'; Saurabh Garg
> Subject: Re: [seek-dev] EcoGrid Query and problems with pubDate
> 
> Steve,
> 
> My (educated) guess is that Metacat isn't casting the values 
> properly to dates. THis is closely related to the casting 
> problems you've been having with latitude and longitude 
> values.  Somebody at NCEAS, probably Sid, will be looking 
> into these issues for Metacat.  We'll be simultaneously 
> trying to deal with the query performance issues which are 
> closely related.
> 
> Matt
> 
> Steve Tekell wrote:
> > There seems to be some potential problems with pubDate and 
> maybe other
> > dates.
> > 
> > eml/dataset/pubDate 
> > can be a year (2002) or a date (2002-06-21)
> > (maybe year+month and no day is ok, too, but I'll ignore 
> that case for now)
> > So, for EML, the datatype of the field is ambiguous.
> > (I haven't begun to look into the other schemas that I'll 
> be searching yet).
> > 
> > If a user enters for start date 2002-01-01, it generates 
> the condition
> > <condition operator="GREATER THAN OR EQUALS"
> > concept="/eml/dataset/pubDate">2002-01-01</condition>
> > 
> > which logically should return anything published in 2002 or 
> later, but it
> > doesn't.  Items with pubDate=2002 won't be returned.  I 
> assume if an item
> > had a pubDate of 2002-06-21 it would be returned, but I am 
> only getting
> > items where the pubDate is a Year instead of Date.
> > 
> > I am guessing that it's doing a String compare on pubDate.  
> Whereas maybe
> > collection date is actually comparing dates.  Collection 
> date searches all
> > time out like the geographic boundary searches since it's 
> storing everything
> > as strings and doing type conversions on the fly.
> > 
> > I guess one solution is for me to cripple the app to only 
> allow pubDate to
> > be a Year instead of Date and treat it separately from 
> collection dates.
> > However, this is a EML/Metacat specific solution.  If other 
> schemas store
> > pubDate as a Date, then using only Year could cause other 
> problems (invalid
> > input).
> > 
> > 
> > I put up a build, a snapshot of my work in progress, on my 
> dev server so
> > that you can see this problem as well as see the various performance
> > problems.  
> > http://lternet-163.lternet.edu:8080/ecogrid/query.jsp 
> > Remember this is just an early stage test app.
> > The results screen currently shows the execution time for 
> the EcoGrid client
> > query as well as the generated Query XML.  So you can grab 
> the XML of
> > queries that timeout and do other tests.
> > 
> > Steve
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > seek-dev mailing list
> > seek-dev at ecoinformatics.org
> > http://www.ecoinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/seek-dev
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
> http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
> University of California Santa Barbara
> Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>