Re: substring filters using DN attributes ?

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

"Kurt D. Zeilenga" wrote:
>
> I've meaning to publish a regexMatch rule I-D which would allow
> matching of an asserted regular expression against the string
> representation of attribute values.  Of course, to be useful with
> DNs, we'd have to have to define a canonical string representation
> of DNs.  Given such, you would be able to do DN matching like:
> 
>         (member:regexMatch:=.*,dc=example,dc=com$)
> 
> Such a matching rule, I believe, would be generally useful in
> a number of applications.  Of course, user applications may
> not want to expose regular expressions to average Joe.
> 
> If others concur that this would be generally useful, I'll put
> up a straw man proposal after IETF#48.

It would be interesting to see examples of the kinds of LDAP application
problems that would be more easily addressed if such a matching rule was
available.  If all we really need is a way to anchor the start and end
of strings (i.e., ^ and $ from regex), I'd rather see a more narrow
proposal.  Why?  Because general regular expression matching will be
quite difficult to support using indexes, etc.

-- 
Mark Smith
Directory Product Development / Netscape Communications
My words are my own, not my employer's.            Got LDAP?