Subject: [Sip] Typo in RFC 3261 - regarding REGISTER processing

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 15:24:50 -0000

Page 66 details how a registrar should process a REGISTER message, in
particular:- 

"Each Contact value MUST feature an "expires" parameter indicating its
expiration interval chosen by the registrar."

However, inspection of the registration example on page 214 shows a 200OK
without an expires parameter, it has an Expires header instead. 

Which of these is correct? I really do want to do the minimum amount of
parsing in my app.

Matthew Gardiner
Software Engineer
Aculab 
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---

From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 12:42:31 -0500

Matthew,

Response below.

	Paul

[email-masked] wrote:
> However, inspection of the registration example on page 214 shows a 
> 200OK without an expires parameter, it has an Expires header instead.
> 

I have always thought that MUST to be a bit excessive. In a REGISTER 
request, the Expires header provides a default that may be overridden in 
each Contact. AFAIK there is no particular reason, other than this 
arbitrary restriction, why the same shouldn't be true in responses. The 
example seems to provide some ammunition for my point of view. But as 
things stand I agree with you that there is a small bug in the spec.

Based on the language you quote you would be justified in considering a 
response without an expires in the Contact as an error. OTOH, you have 
no way to report the error, so you need to do the best you can if it 
occurs. The best thing to do would probably be to handle it the same as 
in a request.

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