Re: ber_printf's return type in the C API

[mcs@netscape.com (Mark C Smith)]

Gil Kirkpatrick wrote:
> 
> Mark,
> 
> There's a coding idion for sprintf() that looks something like this:
> 
> char* p = malloc( BIG_ENOUGH );
> 
> for( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )
> {
>         p += sprintf( p, "%s %d", "foo", i );
> }
> 
> I'ts a concise way to effectively concatenate the results of several
> sprintfs(). Given that ber_printf() returns -1 instead of 0 on error reduces
> the utility of this scheme.

I am not sure why it would help much to return 0 instead of -1 on error
(you still need to check for errors, right?).  Anyway, you don't need to
implement a scheme like this with ber_printf() because the current
encoding position and all of the details of memory allocation, etc. are
handled internally by the API implementation.  You can just do something
like this:

    BerElement *ber = ber_alloc_t( LBER_USE_DER );
    if ( NULL == ber ) {
        return( -1 );		/* allocation error */
    } else {
        for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
            if ( ber_printf( ber, "si", "foo", i ) == -1 ) {
                ber_free( ber, 1 );
                return( -1 );   /* encoding error  */
            }
        }
    }
    ...

-- 
Mark Smith
iPlanet Directory Architect / Sun-Netscape Alliance
My words are my own, not my employer's.   Got LDAP?