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As announced here last week I have an "OpenDDR json service" up and
running on one of my servers here.

It doesn't do anything particularly spectacular : it responds to, in
this case a DDR : Device Description Request, with a JSON formatted
key - value 'dictionary' of all the properties and their respective
values for the resolved device's UA, using the OpenDDR resources and code.

What I did try to address is the question of how to get the
UA-to-resolve from the requester -- who also has it's own UA -- to the
DDR service.

In a 'regular' RESTful service a 'query parameter' is part of the URL.
However in this case, an UA as a 'query parameter' in an URL raises a
number of issues :

- - it's *ugly*,
- - it makes the 'service' hard to read thru it's URL,
- - the URL's length could become an issue, but most importantly :
- - UAs can include character sequences that can cause errors and
legitimate security concerns with the receiving server

As a result, I proposed an extra HTTP request header field :
Ddr-User-Agent whose value is the UA-to-resolve.
(http://www.ducis.net/Static/rfc_ddr_api.htm)

Since RESTful requests are constructed 'programatically' putting the
UA in an additional header rather then the URL shouldn't prove to be
much of a coding challenge.

The service is described here (including code examples) :
http://www.ducis.net/Miri/Ddr

You can test the service 'code-less' using a Chrome plugin like cRest
as shown in this screen-print.
http://www.ducis.net/Static/ddr_rest.png

If you think this is a useful proposal, I'll gladly contribute the
documentation and code examples such are they are to the DeviceMap
repository.

Regards,

esjr
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