For the final versions, I suspect we'll want to build the PDFs from the production system to capture any changes authors have made. That way I also don't have to diddle URLs that point back to the source respository, so that footnotes in the book say cnx.org instead of confucius.cnx.rice.edu. All that cna be done of course, but then it has to be ripped back out of the PDF generation code later when the real solution comes along. But I'll be flexible, and if there are serious considerations against putting the templates on production, I'll work around it.

> >I'm using products I grabbed from a production > >instance on 5/8/2007. > > > >Something like this for getting authors by collection ID: > > > > > > > > Rich Baraniuk > > > > > > > > Rich Baraniuk > > > > > > > > > >with a URI that has the collection ID somewhere in it, e.g.: > > > > http://confucius.cnx.rice.edu/content/col10064/latest/getCredits > > > > Easy enough. I'll have one ready for you in a minute.

Sounds good. Thanks!

> >and something like this for getting author profiles by userid: > > > > The founder and Chief Visionary Officer of > > Connexions. DSP guru of the first water. Eh? > > > >with a URI perhaps like this: > > > > http://confucius.cnx.rice.edu/member_profile/richb/getBio > > > >How does this sound? Do we need to sit down and talk about it? > > > > Well, it might be more like > > http://confucius.cnx.rice.edu/getBio/richb > > > Would it be acceptable to just put this info in the above structure?

So I would do one call to get bios for all contributors to a collection? Sure, as long as the resulting format (a) makes sense, (b) is well-formed XML in UTF-8, and (c) consistent. Something like this (modulo the whitespace), perhaps:

Rich Baraniuk Rich Baraniuk Rich Baraniuk Rich Baraniuk

Or not, just as long as I can parse it and make sense of it.