This e-mail message was assigned to me as an ACTION ITEM for one of the
ramifications. It reflects the consensus of the telecon and is being
distributed for wider e-mail discussion/agreement.
In the past, we agreed that we did not need a (read-only) Job Description
attribute that the Printer used to indicate the number of documents in the job.
This agreement was because we had other job level attributes from which
the end-user/operator could see the number of documents in the job, such
as "document-name", which had a value for each document. But now that
we have deleted the document attributes ("document-name", "document-uri",
and "document-format") as persistent document attributes, it seems useful
to provide users, operators, and clients a means to determine the number
of documents in a job.
Such a Job Description attribute is OPTIONAL for implementation and only
makes sense for an implementation that supports the Create-Job/Send-Document
operations. However, we probably don't even need to mandate the attribute
for implementations that support Create-Job/Send-Document operations, just
make it a recommendation.
The proposed text for inclusion in section 4.3 Job Description Attributes,
perhaps after "job-state-message":
Add to the table:
+---------------------+------------------+---------------------+
| number-of-documents | integer | |
+---------------------+------------------+---------------------+
4.3.10 number-of-documents (integer(0:2**31 - 1))
This attribute indicates the number of documents in the job, i.e, the number
of Send-Document, Send-URI, Print-Job, or Print-URI operations that
the Printer has accepted for this job, regardless of whether the document
data has reached the Printer or not.
Implementations supporting the OPTIONAL Create-Job/Send-Document/Send-URI
operations SHOULD support this attribute.