Subject: more comments on draft-ietf-trade-iotp-v1.0-protocol-05.txt

From: Andras Varga <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 17:24:13 +0200

Some comments to draft-ietf-trade-iotp-v1.0-protocol-05.txt:

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From 7.6.1.1 Organisation IDs:
IOTP> NonConsumerOrgId   If the Role is not Consumer then this contains the
IOTP>                    Canonical Name for the non-consumer organisation
IOTP>                    being described by the Organisation Component. See
IOTP>                    [DNS].
IOTP>
IOTP>                    Note that a NonConsumerOrgId may not start with
IOTP>                    the ConsumerOrgIdPrefix.
IOTP>
IOTP>                    Use of upper and lower case is not significant.

Occasionally it may happen that a Merchant does not have its own
domain name. For example, www.passage.hu offers e-commerce services
to merchants, so the URLs of the individual shops (merchants) are 
www.passage.hu/Caori, www.passage.hu/TicketExpress, etc. How should 
the NonConsumerOrgId be produced in such a case?
----
Section 2.2.4 Authentication Exchange say that an Authentication Exchange uses:
IOTP>  o A Trading Role Information Request Component that requests information
IOTP>    about an Organisation, for example a ship to or billing address.

This is the only place where the words "billing address" occur in the document.
I recommend it to be made more explicit that the billing address is the
Consumer role's postal address.
----
I suggest adding the following codes to 7.16.2 Payment Completion Codes:
 MerchNotSupp    The Merchant is not served by the Payment Handler.
                 No recovery possible.

 PaymtPending    Payment Pending. The payment is a longer process and cannot
                 be completed while the Consumer is online. (For example,
                 Direct Debit or Bank Transfer is used for the payment which 
                 takes several hours or days to complete.) This is only valid 
                 if ProcessState is CompletedOk.
                 No recovery possible.

 Paid            Payment finished successfully (as opposed to being pending).
                 This is only valid if ProcessState is CompletedOk.
                 No recovery possible.
----
If the payment completion code is PaymtPending, it might be useful NOT to
return the PayReceipt component immediately in the Payment Response Block.
In this case, the Consumer could retrieve the PayReceipt later with an Inquiry 
when the payment finished. I believe this is not possible in the current
version of IOTP. Opinions?
----
Again 7.16.2 Payment Completion Codes:
IOTP> BadInstrument      Bad instrument. There is a problem with the
IOTP>                    Payment Instrument being used which means that it
IOTP>                    is unable to be used for the payment.

A potential error situation is that the payment amount is too small 
(or too big) for the given brand/protocol. For example, credit cards 
cannot be used for micropayments. Since this is not a problem with the
Payment Instrument itself, I recommend the error description be changed to: 
  "The Payment Instrument cannot be used for the payment for some reason
  (e.g. the credit card is invalid, or payment amount is too small/too big 
  for the Payment Instrument)."
An alternative would be to introduce AmountTooLarge and AmountTooSmall
error codes.
----
Comment:
Authentication Exchange can be used to communicate trading role info 
between trading roles. For example, the Delivery Handler can authenticate 
the Consumer to obtain the shipping address. A potential problem is that 
Authentication is initiated by the Delivery Handler not the Consumer, 
so I believe currently there is no way for the Consumer to tell a changed 
shipping address to the Delivery Handler unless the Delivery Handler 
explicitly asks for it in an Authentication Reqeuest. Opinions?

Regards,
Andras

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Andras Varga [[email-masked]], Project Manager
MeTechnology Ltd. Hungary - a Brokat Company
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