Hello,

While implementing some of CDDLM tests (CDL/Deployment API), I've found the following problems:

1. The implementation of the CDLTestUtils.java has the method:

   /**
     * Get a required attribute of an element. We search first for the namespace qualified attribute,
     * then the non-namespaced version.
     *
     * @param element   element to search
     * @param attribute attr
     * @param docinfo   document data
     * @return the attribute value
     * @throws CDLException if the attribute is not there
     */
    public static String getAttribute(Element element, String namespace, String attribute, String docinfo) {

        String attr = element.getAttributeNS(namespace, attribute);
     if (attr == null)) {
//    if ("".equals(attr)) {
            attr = element.getAttribute(attribute);
        }
        if (attr == null)) {
//      if ("".equals(attr)) {
            //raise an error on an empty attribute
            throw new CDLException("No " + attribute + " for " + element.getTagName() + docinfo);
        }
        return attr;
    }

The commented part (if...) is how I think it is the correct, as the documentation of org.w3c.dom.Element says:

String org.w3c.dom.Element.getAttributeNS(String namespaceURI, String localName)
(...)
Returns:
    The Attr value as a string, or the empty string if that attribute does not have a specified or
    default value.
(...)

Is anyone against I commit these changes?

2. The deployment API has the test:

api-18: Create a System while subscribed with an invalid endpoint

Subscribe to a portal for creation events with a notification EPR that is invalid. There are the following types of invalid portal

Nonexistent URL (e.g. "http://notifications.example.org/epr1").
endpoint with no open connection (e.g. "http://localhost:8081/epr1"), assuming port 8081 is closed
404 URL (e.g. "http://deployment.sourceforge.net/example/epr1").

Assertions:

In all cases, the notification delivery failure is noted, the endpoint is no longer subscribed

Don't you think this behavior of simply unsubscribing the consumer in its first failure can result in bad unsubscriptions? I mean, the failure can be transient and only by a few seconds can make the consumer unreachable/invalid.
The other problem is that I didn't find in the WSN specification what must be done when a notification fails. Does it mean that it is free to the implementation have its own policy when notification fails? The Pubscribe implementation tries to notify a certain number of times when an EndPoint Reference is invalid and then quits, but does not unsubscribe the EPR - which means that, when in the future an event that must be notified occurs, the implementation will try to notify the invalid EPR again.

Guilherme