Description
The Catalog provides the capability to query, create, update, and delete Metacards, retrieve resources, and retrieve information about the sources in the enterprise.
Each of these Operations follow a request/response paradigm. The request is the input to the operation and contains all of the input parameters needed by the Catalog Framework's operation to communicate with the Sources. The response is the output from the execution of the Operation that is returned to the client, and contains all of the data returned by the Sources. For each Operation there is an associated request/response pair, e.g., the QueryRequest and QueryResponse pair for the Catalog Framework's query operation.
All of the request and response objects are extensible in that they can contain additional key/value properties on each request/response. This allows additional capability to be added without changing the Catalog API, helping to maintain backwards compatibility. Refer to the Developer's Guide for details on using this extensibility.