WCST should throw an error or rename the rasdaman collection when coverage name contains a "-"

[Alex Dumitru]

Rasdaman does not support collection names that contain "-" (e.g. "My-Collection").
However WCST accepts this as a valid coverage name, in WCS coverageId is of type NCName (​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1631396/what-is-an-xsncname-type-and-when-should-it-be-used) which seems to support "-".

Idea 1: Rename the rasdaman collection to something containing "_" instead of "-".

Idea 2: Reject coverages with names containing "-"

@Peter, Vlad: which one should it be?

[Dimitar Misev]

Voting for 1

[Peter Baumann]

rasql level:
This was an early-on decision to make parsing easier (eg, is "a-1" an expression or a name?).
With today's technology that should be easier to resolve, therefore: should we rethink collection names altogether, relaxing to more general names? Some people like to have ":" and other strange beasts in a name…

coverage level:
as per the coverage standard, a coverage id is an NCName which is [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9], so by way of GML even more restrictive. It is just our implementation that allows it.
Note, though, that CIS 1.1 will allow more general naming indeed, liberating from GML restrictions when other encodings such as JSON are used → we may want to be more generic.

Bottom line, my view:

• answer 1: for now, users should only create valid coverage names; auto renaming adds complexity for the users, that's dangerous.
• answer 2: medium range, we should streamline WCS-T and rasql, also in view of CIS 1.1.

[Alex Dumitru]

NCName allows "-", see here ​http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/ch19-77215.html so it is a valid coverage name.

[Peter Baumann]

oops, my bad. Withdrawing all "-" related positions.