Subject: Few more questions on MEGACOP.

From: Shalini Philip <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 18:21:00 +0530

Hello Brian,

    I have a few more questions on MEGACOP. If you can throw some light
on them
too, it would be really helpful.

Questions:

1. The ABNF specification shows an error descriptor at the level of
message definition.  In what scenario is this error descriptor sent ? Is
this the top level error message sent on receiving an invalid
transaction reply ? For example, when an Action reply  is missing in a
Transaction reply.

2.  Consider the definition of TimeNotation in the ABNF Specification on

page 53 and 54. Why  8 digits is specified for Time field of
TimeNotation definition ?

As per ISO 8601:1988, the time can be shown as
a)  hh:mm:ssTZD, where
    hh,mm and ss represent hours, minutes and seconds respectively.
    TZD = the Time Zone Descriptor. This is usually expressed in terms
of offset from Coordinated Universal Time (the
     old Grenwich Mean Time) and is expressed in plus or minus hours and
minutes.
Or
b) hh:mm:ssZ - UTC time.

Thus the number of digits required to represent time field should be 11
digits and not 8 digits.
Please let me know if I am missing anything here.

Regards,

Shalini Philip
Ficon Technology
E-Mail : mailto:[email-masked]
Web    : http://www.ficon-tech.com

---

From: Brian Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 09:51:30 -0400

> transaction reply ? For example, when an Action reply  is missing in a
It's generally where the error is not confined to a specific
transaction.  The easiest to understand is where it can't parse the message
(find the end of a transaction), but it would also
occur if an invalid transactionID was found, for example.

> Please let me know if I am missing anything here.
The format is  ISO 8601:1988 's short format :
    YYYYMMDD hhmmss

This does raise the issue in my mind if this implies it's
always UTC, or it's "local".  I'd go with UTC.

Brian