Re: order of attribute values

[Forest Hill <forest@apple.com>]

At 12:54 PM -0700 10/13/05, Howard Chu wrote:
> Forest Hill wrote:
> > In current implementations OpenLDAP (2.2.x & 2.3.x) what's the 
> > stand of guaranteeing order of attribute values? I've always been 
> > under the assumption that there was no guarantee of preservation of 
> > attribute value order. Can someone clarify this?
> The X.500 and LDAP specifications explicitly state that order is not 
> preserved and must not be relied on. In OpenLDAP 2.3 we've 
> implemented a number of extensions that allow the order of values in 
> multi-valued attributes to be preserved. The first is the X-ORDERED 
> 'VALUES' extension which may be specified in an attribute's schema 
> definition. I have discussed this extension at length in earlier 
> posts to this list, check the archives for more details.
>
> Also in 2.3 is the valsort overlay which allows multi-valued 
> attribute values to be ordered dynamically based on simple sorting 
> rules (alpha / numeric ascending / descending, weighted). See the 
> slapo-valsort(5) manpage for more details.
>
> RFCs for both of these features will be coming out in the near 
> future. I don't know that they need to progress to anything more 
> than Informational status, but we'll see.

Great.  Thanks for the info, folks!
--

Forest Hill
Apple Computer, Inc.
408-426-4141
forest@apple.com