List of remote servers

[rjwalker]

From my reading of the JZKit source code (and the GN code which uses JZKit) it seems that Z39.50 remote searching is only by "Collection", not by "Instance". The idea is that a "Collection" may be accessible from more than one "Repository" - for each "Collection", there will be one or more "Instance"s of "Repository"s (Z39.50 servers) that can be used to search that "Collection". (It turns out the JZKit code always uses the last "Instance" when choosing a "Repository" to connect to to search a "Collection". For the record, this is in the second createTask() method of jzkit/src/com/k_int/hss/HeterogeneousSetOfSearchable.java.)

JZKit does not appear to support searching "Instance"s, only "Collection"s.

So the GN remote search page should present a list of the "Collection"s, not a list of "Instance"s, and the <servers> values sent back by the search form (which are passed on to JZKit) should be the collection_dn values, not the instance_dn values.

If I'm right, the attached patch should do the trick. As I said earlier, this makes absolutely no difference to the generated HTML search page at the moment because everything in the supplied repositories.xml.tem file matches up so perfectly.

If I'm wrong, I must be really confused - someone please enlighten me!

[rjwalker]

Fix list of remote servers

[ticheler]

Currently no GUI for Z39.50, so postponed until later release.

[simonp]

This is relevant for 2.5.0 Z3950 harvesting and searches with collection name on the GeoNetwork Z3950 server.

Searching by collections is the norm in JZKit3 too and is now supported in the new Z fixes for GeoNetwork. In particular:

• Z3950 harvesting offers the list of collections from the config file rather than just the instances (see for example WALIS config) and
• When searching the GeoNetwork Z server, collections are mapped to category names (example in the config file).

This will obviously also be supported in whatever redesign of the search interface incorporates remote search.