Uniform Treatment of Pending Action Notification in EPP A Strawman Proposal
draft-liu-epp-pa-notify-00

Abstract

Many domain registries, especially sponsored TLDs and ccTLDs, have specific policy that calls for the server to perform additional backend processing before it completes a transform operation on an object requested by a client. When the pending action is completed, the server must notify the client about the outcome. However, current EPP core specifications do not address the notification messaging in a generic way. As a result, a registry has to resort to defining a new schema as extension to the object mapping concerned for this purpose. Inspired by recent discussions on the 'ietf-provreg' mailing list on related topics, this draft presents a strawman proposal for uniform treatment of server notification for pending action in the base EPP protocol. A new OPTIONAL child element is added to <poll> response as basic notification content, which consists of the transaction ID that triggered the pending action and the outcome of the pending action. In addition, object specific data and extension information can be piggybacked in existing child elements of <response>. The required modification to the EPP base protocol is kept to the minimum and incurs no change to the EPP base object mappings. Most importantly, the proposed solution is applicable to any object mapping, ensuring EPP's extensibility beyond domain registry applications. Strong interests by the registry community in deploying this feature warrant that it be best handled as a generic but optional feature in the EPP base protocol. This allows any registry to handle pending action without the need to define a new schema, eliminating the proliferation of ad hoc object extensions repetitively defined by disparate registries for the very same purpose.

Authors

Dr. Hong Liu

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)