Before I submit a draft outline for the IPP Scenarios, I thought it
might be best if we first agreed upon a very terse summary outline
of the top-level functionality for IPP.
This terse summary would serve as the basis for deriving all scenarios.
Having such a functional summary should tend to ensure that the pictures
we paint for the scenarios are indeed rooted in the agreed upon feature
set.
The previously published "Internet Printing Requirements" document
(ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/drafts/draft-wright-ipp-req-00.pdf)
focused on describing IPP features as a function of "Role Model".
The proposed summary differs from that approach in that all features
are grouped together (independent of the target Role Model) into the
following overall functional categories:
1. Printer Discovery
2. Driver Installation
3. Job Submission
4. Status Display
5. Job Modification
The above order of top-level features may be viewed as the potential
"step-by-step" sequence of events a typical user might encounter in a
complete "cycle" of using IPP to effect a print request.
In other words, we might have our first scenario with this order in
that we may describe a sort of "worst case" sequence of events a user
might encounter when trying to print a target web page:
1. Find a suitable printer based on whatever criteria is
appropriate for the user (location, features, etc.)
(Printer Discovery)
2. Setup the local system to use the target printer
(Driver Installation)
3. Request that the web page be printed on that printer
(Job Submission)
4. Monitor the progress of job processing, noting any problems
that might arise with the printer (Status Display)
5. Alter the original job parameters, or possibly cancel the
request altogether (Job Modification)
This crude worst-case scenario is not all encompassing, but should
serve as a reasonable basis for describing the essential aspects of
IPP operation. (At least this is *my* understanding of what IPP is all
about; if I'm off-base here in any way, please speak up pronto!)
If we assume that the above list represents the top-level categories
of the target features, then the complete feature set may be further
described in the following outline:
1. Printer Discovery
1.1 List printers by selected criteria
1.2 Display the capabilities of a printer
2. Driver Installation
2.1 Install support for a target printer
2.2 Uninstall support for a target printer
3. Job Submission
3.1 Print the current web page
3.2 Print a specified URL
3.3 Select job parameters
4. Status Display
4.1 View the status of a printer
4.2 View the status of a job or set of jobs
4.3 Receive notification of a printer alert
4.4 Receive notification of job completion
5. Job Modification
5.1 Modify one or more parameters of a job
5.2 Cancel a job
Note that, unlike the top level of the outline, there is no particular
rationale for the order of the elements at the second level of the
outline.
Is this outline useful as a basis from which all scenarios are to
be derived?
...jay
PS: The astute reader may realize that a particular set of features
have been omitted from this outline. Should this omission prove
inappropriate, we can always add it to the outline.
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