Facility Operating Hours should be Optional

[edjez]

Currently the schema shows OperatingHours to be mandatory. It is not known in many cases and not a required part of the data dictionary of known facility registry countries. Mandating its existence will probably result in garbage or placeholder data.

Recommendation

• Make facilityOperatingHours optional

[djritz]

This argument is similar to that for facility language. As with language, the action will be to relax the requirement and add an open item to the front matter of the spec describing which use cases are broken by doing so. As with language, there is always an option to put default information or some indication that the information is "unknown" into a mandatory field rather than allowing the information to be omitted altogether.

[edjez]

By "relax the requirement" you mean make the element optional in the XSD? (minOccurs=0)

That would be the best option. Unlike a traditional relational database where a field is 'there' whether it has data for it or not (and therefore calling the need for NULLs of different flavors and all that jazz); XML allows you to have the omission of the document. Having minOccurs=0 is also faster for XML parsers and helps reduce out-of-band communication about 'flavors of null' that would be required for interoperability. (which of all the language codes for unknown/unspecified would be used?)

Note that none of the countries implementing FR right now required languages or Operating Hours fields (not even as optional)

Let me know if the XSD gets set to minOccurs=0 and I'll close this item - thx Derek!

[djritz]

Hi Ed.

"Relax" meant minOccurs=0, as we had discussed on our call last week.

Derek.

PS: i tried to copy/paste the XSD into this message but it formats very oddly. is there something i'm missing?