Re: Returning matched values only from a search operation

[Sean Mullan <sean.mullan@Sun.COM>]

Mark C Smith wrote:
> 
> Sean Mullan wrote:
> >
> > The search operation defined by X.511 contains a BOOLEAN
> > matchedValuesOnly argument, which if true returns only the values
> > in a multi-valued attribute which match the specified filter
> > (as opposed to all the values).
> >
> > This seems like a very useful feature, but does not appear to
> > be enabled by the LDAP search operation. Has there been an
> > LDAP control to add this functionality?
> >
> > For example, the matchedValuesOnly control could be combined with
> > an extensible certificate matching rule to only return the matching
> > certificates from an entry's multi-valued userCertificate attribute.
> 
> I don't remember all of the discussion, but I think this was left out of
> LDAPv3 in order to simplify the protocol.  In my experience, this bell
> (or is it a whistle?) is not desperately needed by LDAP applications
> because most applications are content with retrieving all of the values
> and examining the values themselves.  That isn't really much more work
> for the application or inefficient as long as (1) the application knows
> how to compare the values and (2) there are not dozens or hundreds of
> values.

Perhaps, but I can certainly think of cases where there might be a large
number of values per attribute or the matching rules are only supported
by the server. Since the server already knows which values satisfy the 
match, it seems worthwhile to optionally make that available to the client.

-- 
Sean Mullan			Email: sean.mullan@sun.com
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