Re: Nick names search extension

[dboreham@netscape.com (David Boreham)]

Erik Skovgaard wrote:
> I am not sure why you would want to use a control
> for that.  Why not just
> put the nicknames in the name attribute?  The cn attribute is
> multi-valued
> in the standard schema (I have to make this qualification given the
> many
> different schemae that seem to be published).  Only one of the
> values of
> this attribute is distinguished, of course, but you can search on the
> rest.
This doesn't sound like a terribly good way to
solve the original poster's problem.
Multivalued cn is good for things like
a person who decides to change their name,
or a person with two names by which they
are known.

However, the problem of finding the Roberts
when you ask for the Bobs seems like a matching
issue. You'd never want to precompute all
the potential aliases and add them to the
entries, would you ?
You'd potentially also want to be able
to search either looking for the alias names,
or not---both are useful to do. If you
store multiple names in cn, you've effectively
prevented one type of search.
(e.g. I want to find all the people who
are really called "Bob", not the Roberts too).