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RE: The 'any' attribute type
I agree with Mark. The client can simply ask for the attributes it
wants. In the reply, any attributes with a language option set to French
(say) or with no language option at all can be displayed and all others
can be discarded. This would be the 'French' configuration of the
address book. The Italian version would work similarly.
I don't think servers should be burdened with tasks that are better
handled in other ways. In particular, changing the model to suit the
client is very irksome. I refer here to the notion that a particular OID
can represent 'all attributes'.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Greenblatt [SMTP:bgreenblatt@directory-applications.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 27, 1999 2:51 PM
> To: Mark Wahl; Jim Sermersheim
> Cc: ietf-ldapext@netscape.com
> Subject: Re: The 'any' attribute type
>
> At 07:47 PM 8/26/99 -0500, Mark Wahl wrote:
> >Fourth,
> >
> >What does a client do with foo;lang-ja when it does not know foo? I
> don't
> >see the value of an option that allows a client to be sent some
> subset of the
> >attributes that is neither what it asked for nor a subtype of that.
> We
> already
> >have a way of asking for all information. This control is basically
> the same
> >as asking for all attributes whose attribute types have a 'k' in
> them: the
> >client might get some information that it expected. This sort of
> processing
> >would seem to be best left up to the client.
> >
>
> Mark,
>
> I have to disagree with you on this point. There is a definite need
> for
> this type of feature. The typical scenario that I use comes from a
> real
> scenario (OfficeVision anyone). Consider an LDAP server that is being
> used
> as the back end for an address book application. Assume that it is
> installed at a location in Switzerland. This same server is likely to
> have
> some users that want their information in French, some that want it in
> German, some that want it in Italian, and maybe even some that want it
> in
> Swiss or English... There is currently no way to make use of the
> language
> tags for this purpose. I see this as being completely different from
> "asking for all attributes whose attribute types have a 'k' in them".
> From
> my perspective it would be very cumbersome for the client to have to
> get
> back all of the attributes in every language, sort through them (in
> random
> order for each entry) and then display them. Since the server has
> already
> tagged the attributes with the language tag, I think that it makes
> substantially more sense to ask the LDAP server to make use of the
> information that it has already tagged. I also think that such a
> feature
> would make the sort control substantially more useful.
>
> That said, I'm not too keen on the OID thing that Jim proposed.
> Mark's
> arguments are very persuasive. What was the rationale that my "*;jp"
> proposal got shot down. I can't remember what it was, and my slow
> link
> from home prevents my from searching the archive. If this doesn't
> work,
> some company (Novell maybe) could always define an OID under their
> branch
> in the tree to mean the same thing that Jim proposed 1.1.1 to be.
>
> Bruce
>
> >Mark Wahl, Directory Product Architect
> >Innosoft International, Inc.
> >
> >
> >
> ==============================================
> Bruce Greenblatt, Ph. D.
> Directory Tools and Application Services, Inc.
> http://www.directory-applications.com