RE: Attribute Type character set

["Steven Legg" <steven.legg@adacel.com.au>]

Jim,

The use of ASN.1 "identifier" notation for naming attribute types
comes about from a convention of using the name of the corresponding
X.500 ATTRIBUTE information object as the attribute name for LDAP.
This practice has no particular semantic validity, but also has no
consequences for LDAP to X.500 translation.

The only real constraint on the allowed form of an LDAP attribute type
(or object class, etc) name is that it be unambiguously recognizable
in the LDAP string encodings of syntaxes with embedded attribute type
names (e.g. '=' can't be allowed in type names because it would
confuse the parsing of DNs).

Regards,
Steven

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org
[mailto:owner-ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Jim Sermersheim
Sent: Thursday, 16 November 2000 12:31
To: ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org
Subject: Attribute Type character set


Section 4.1.4 in RFC 2251 talks about the allowable characters for an
attribute type name (when represented as a string). It includes ASCII
letters, digits and hyphens. My assumption is that this came from section
9.3 of X.680 which states:

"An "identifier" shall consist of an arbitrary number (one or more) of
letters, digits, and hyphens. The initial character shall be a lower-case
letter. A hyphen shall not be the last character. A hyphen shall not be
immediately followed by another hyphen."

RFC 2251 doesn't place the same restrictions on hyphen characters (or the
case of the inital character). I don't suppose this causes problems with
X.500/LDAP gateways but I wanted to be sure.

Jim