Re: Editing standard schema files / search filters

[Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@stanford.edu>]

--On Saturday, March 05, 2005 8:23 PM +1100 Robert Davidson 
<puttputt@iaccess.ws> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm new to LDAP (openldap) and am currently in the process of programming
> LDAP support into an in-house program as well as learning about LDAP at
> the same time.
>
> What I need to know is, how much of a sin is it to edit what I believe is
> "standard" LDAP schema (eg /etc/ldap/schema/nis.ldap) ?
>
> I wanted to get >= and <= working in search filters, and the way I
> achieved that was to add the rule "ORDERING integerOrderingMatch" to the
> uidNumber attribute, in the nis.schema file distributed with OpenLDAP 2.1.
>
> It doesn't feel like the right way to do it to me, so is there a better
> way to achieve the same thing, or is this way correct?

The various schema files are based on RFC's.  If the RFC doesn't define an 
ordering rule for the attribute, then by modifying the schema you are now 
violating the RFC and have what would technically be an invalid schema.  If 
you need to have an attribute that supports ordering, there is nothing 
stopping you from creating your own schema with your own attribute with its 
own rules. :)

See:

<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2307.txt>

which specifically does not include an ORDERING rule.

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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