Re: Extensibility of SearchRequest.attributes

[mcs@netscape.com (Mark C Smith)]

I agree with the approach suggested by Kurt. Creating an extensibility 
mechanism for AttributeDescriptions is a new LDAP feature and should be 
out of scope for LDAPBis. But doing a little work in LDAPBis to allow 
for the possibility makes sense to me.

I am a little concerned about leaving the possibilities for "specials" 
wide open. If we adopt the statement suggested by Kurt, then servers 
must accept any octet inside an AttributeDescription. Perhaps most 
implementations already do, but some may not.

-Mark Smith
 Netscape


Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
> We need to be careful here.
>
> That said, another possibility would be to change it to:
>         SEQUENCE OF AttributeDescriptionOrSpecial
>         AttributeDescriptionOrSpecial ::= LDAPString
>
> where the LDAPString is contains a value conforming to the production:
>         attributeDescriptionOrSpecial = attributeDescription / specials
>         specials = "*"
>
> and a statement:
>         The specials production may be updated by standard track
>         technical specifications updating this document to allow
>         additional specials. Servers MUST treat specials they do
>         not recognize as unrecognized attribute types.
>
> This leaves the exact form of a future specials up to
> future standard track technical specifications.
>
> If one wanted to allow non-standard track specification of
> specials, then one could write a standard track specification
> defining a family of specials that have disambiguated by
> an IANA registry of specials.  I rather leave this to others
> (e.g., not LDAPBIS).
>
> Kurt