Atomicity of credential issuance and reference creation

[troyronda]

Moved discussion from w3c-ccg/vc-issuer-http-api#43 (comment)

@dlongley wrote:

That's right. Nothing is stored on the server without it also having been issued and there's no option to only issue a credential without storing a reference to it. If you want or need to use another service to compose the credential via a template/other options before submitting it to be issued, the /credentials/compose method can be used if made available by the implementer.

@troyronda wrote:

@dlongley Ok that makes sense under those assumptions.
Are there alternative situations where:

• a separate system is responsible for storing the credential references? if so, they might want a /credentials that has a fully issued credential in the payload.
• someone is not planning to store the credential reference.

(those scenarios could impact the consistency of a combined issue + store operation on /credentials)

[OR13]

I would close this issue, since templates / incremental credential building would appear to be out of scope for the current API design.

[msporny]

This issue was discussed on the telecon today, and the following resolution was approved:

RESOLVED: Regarding issue #34, if a caller desires to build a VC incrementally of from a template, the caller can use another API to do so and then send the fully formed VC to the VC HTTP API for processing.

[msporny]

The group discussed this on 2022-03-29 and decided that it wasn't useful to add the text resolved above. Closing without any changes to the specification.