Re: Nick names search extension

[Erik Skovgaard <eskovgaard@geotrain.com>]

David,

See below.

At 10:01 98/11/06 -0800, David Boreham wrote:
>  Erik Skovgaard wrote:   Why not just 
>  The cn attribute is multi-valued 
>in the standard schema (I have to make this qualification given the many 
>  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 

If a person's first name is Robert, and I add Bob as the second value does
that not qualify as two names?

>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 ? 

No, I would not want that, but if a receptionist receives a phone call for
Bob and he/she/it has to search for any entry with cn=Bob, that does not
require any pre-processing, as far as I am concerned.  It is only a matter
of specifying the right filter.

>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. 

Unless I put the alias name in the cn attribute as well :-)

>(e.g. I want to find all the people who 
>are really called "Bob", not the Roberts too). 

I see your point here.  Of course, if the other name is known, you can
merely exclude theose entries by designing the right filter.

Yet another option is to include a given name attribute.  This was actually
defined in one of the X.500 recommendations, but never used in any of the
standard Object Classes.  And if you *really* want to go wild, you can
create another attribute, say altGivenName which can be derived from
givenName.

Cheers,                  ....Erik.

---------------------------------
Erik Skovgaard
GeoTrain Corp.
Directory and Security Integration Services
http://www.geotrain.com

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