Re: Families of Entries

["Mark D. Anderson" <mda@discerning.com>]

>Indexes would need to built that combined the indexes of the 
>separate entries, for the typical groupings used by the users.

FYI, this the key thing that has prevented me from shoehorning
something like wpPerson syntax into an existing LDAP server.
I would just have a value spelling convention like "2091234567 (pref)".
The main obstactle to doing that immediately (assuming i have
coding control over the clients, which i happen to have) is
that it ruins any kind of equality or other indexing on those strings.

More questions:

Do you have any examples where more than one level deep is actually
necessary?

What sort of ACL/schema controls would allow me to express that
certain child entries are necessary/optional/mandatory/prohibited?
For example, that it is mandatory for any "phone" entry to have
a child entry for "home_or_work", and is allowed to have a child
entry for "is_old".

How do I remove a particular child, or change the value of its attribute?
Apparently the family members don't have individual DN's; I have to
address the whole family as a DN, and identify a particular child with
a filter? Or what?

Could there be an automatic emulation (or whatever) of the language parameter,
the one parameter that LDAP already supports (AFAIK)?

Could this be used to solve another problem, of what I called "structured"
attributes? Attributes such as address in vCard/ldap have a positional
syntax for constituent parts (city, zip, etc.). It would be nice to be
able to manipulate either the complex object or its contained attributes.
Generally, properties are only attached to the whole complex object
("pref", "home", etc.)? That is where things get a little confusing --
the semantics of the family hierarchy could either be containment or
metadata.

-mda