[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

Re: Defaults for Compound Entries



Rob,

I have not copied my message and your answers again as it is 
getting too long. Suffice to say you have one mis-understanding 
about the way that a whole family is represented as single 
compound entry in a result. You thought that, quote

I was assuming that a single entry would be returned with the union 
of attributes of the family members. The association information that 
was embodied in the structure of the family would be lost, but that's 
the best a clueless client can hope for. 

This has never been proposed or suggested. The proposal is to have 
a complex structured attribute that contains RDNs followed by the 
attributes in that family member, so that the structure is maintained. 
(Read the ID section 5.1 again for a definition of this). If the whole 
set of attributes from each family member were to be merged 
together on retrieval then this would negate the whole purpose of 
families, which are to link together related sets of attributes. The 
merging together would remove their whole purpose for existance, 
and so there would be no point in having them!! Thus the alternative 
to the complex attribute in a single entry is simply to send each 
family member as a separate entry so that the relationships between 
attributes can still be maintained.

Clearly there is a problem with the existing MS and Netscape clients 
that hide the DNs and the DIT structure and that return subtrees of 
entries as a flat picking list. However this could be catered for by 
embedding an attribute value (say common name) in each family 
entry as follows. So we could have for example in my family of 
entries:

  Common Name
David Chadwick.......followed by a set of attributes
David Chadwick's telephone entry....followed by a set of attributes
David Chadwick' fax entry.....followed by a set of attributes
David Chadwick's email entry.....followed by a set of attributes
David Chadwick's email's account entry......followed by a set of 
attributes etc

Here the common name of each family entry is used to denote its 
position within the family. And this would work with existing quarter 
clients I think

David



The other
***************************************************

David Chadwick
IS Institute, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT
Tel +44 161 295 5351  Fax +44 161 745 8169
Mobile +44 790 167 0359
*NEW* Email D.W.Chadwick@salford.ac.uk *NEW*
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
Entrust key validation string MLJ9-DU5T-HV8J

***************************************************