Client initiated batch Extension

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This specification is a work-in-progress and may have major incompatible changes without warning.

This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment.

Notes for implementing work-in-progress version 🔗

This is a work-in-progress specification.

All specifications depending on this specification MUST be draft specification and use only capability names prefixed by draft/

Introduction 🔗

This specification extends the batch specification to allow client-initiated BATCH commands.

This specification itself does not introduce any client-to-server batch type, but is designed as a framework for other specifications.

Motivation 🔗

Certain specifications call for clients to be able to send batched messages to servers, for instance draft/multiline

Architecture 🔗

Dependencies 🔗

This specification does not depend on the batch capability, which is used for server-initiated batches only.

This specification uses the standard replies framework.

Capabilities 🔗

This specification does not introduce any capability.

Clients SHOULD NOT send BATCH commands to servers, unless they negotiated a capability that allows them to do so.

The client-to-server `BATCH` verb 🔗

This specification introduces client initiated batches. These use the same syntax as server initiated batches.

Once a client has opened a batch, it MUST NOT send any messages that are not part of the batch, until it is closed (with BATCH -reference-tag).

Clients MUST NOT send nested batches, i.e. clients may not send BATCH commands with a batch tag.

Errors 🔗

Servers MUST use FAIL messages from the standard replies framework to notify clients of errors with client-initiated batches. The command is BATCH and the following codes are defined:

INVALID_REFTAG <reference-tag>: the provided reference tag contains disallowed characters, all past and future messages in this batch will be ignored.
TIMEOUT <reference-tag>: the batch was left open for too long, all past and future messages in this batch will be ignored.
UNKNOWN_TYPE <reference-tag> <type>: the batch type is not recognized by the server, all past and future messages in this batch will be ignored.

Implementation considerations 🔗

This section is non-normative.

While this version of the client-initated batch framework does not allow nested batches, future extensions may allow them. Client and server implementations may want to take this into account while designing their internal APIs.

Software supporting client-batch: bIRC