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Re: ldap v2/v3 interoperability
> >For ldap v2 clients interoperating with ldap v2/v3 servers, how is
> >character set translation to be handled? In the case where an entry
> >containing Unicode characters (created by a v3 operation) matches a query
> >from a v2 client, what happens if the Unicode character cannot be
> >translated to T.61? There are several possibilities:
> >
> >1) server returns an error (which error?)
> >2) server returns the Unicode values encoded in some way (what encoding?)
> >3) server returns partial results terminated with an error/warning (what
> >error?)
>
> don't see any answers to this....
We have produced an answer to this through a set of APIs (and supporting C
code) that can translate between any character set into any other character
set, using Unicode (or ISO 10646) as the intermediate storage format.
(Obviously not all the code to support any arbitrary code conversion has been
written - only commonly usuable subsets - but the API fully supports any to
any).
This code and the API specification is now freely available from the EC, since it
was an EC funded research project (the MAITS project). YOu can follow links
to this from my home page, but as I am currently away in China I cannot lay
my hands directly on the contact details for getting this stuff. I will be back after
26 September if anyone wants further details.
David
>
> generally, moving stuff between charsets is painful, and made even more
> painful by the disasters in LDAPv2 where some of the leading software
> vendors decided not to follow the spec, but to do two different
> non-standard things...
>
> The usual strategy is:
>
> - Translate what you can (and make the target charset configurable)
> - Put in some kind of marker for the rest
> - Pray that the customer is satsified
>
> (It's actually possible to encode an incredible amount of stuff in T.61,
> including Greek, Chinese and Hebrew - the problem is that most
> implementations don't have a snowball's chance of presenting it decently.)
>
> Group: Is there a need for an "ldap v2/v3 coexistence document", or are we
> just hoping that LDAPv2 will die quietly?
>
> Harald A
>
> --
> Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
> Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no
>
>
***************************************************
David Chadwick
IT Institute, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT
Tel +44 161 295 5351 Fax +44 161 745 8169
Mobile +44 370 957 287
Email D.W.Chadwick@iti.salford.ac.uk
Home Page http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/chadwick.htm
Understanding X.500 http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/X500.htm
X.500/LDAP Seminars http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/seminars.htm
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