Re: User-defined attribute options (Was: Suggestion: attribute;search)

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 07:27 AM 2002-11-13, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>Kurt D. Zeilenga writes:
>>>> Code wise, they could implemented simply by changing ad.c:
>>>>         (...)
>> 
>> I'm now thinking that instead of having an extensible array
>> of option tag/range prefixes.  The default would be "lang-".
>> This could be extended by a configuration directive to support
>> other hierarchically tags.  For a (contrived) example,
>> "e-geopolitical-" could allow:  telephone;e-geopolitical-us-ca-sf
>> (City and County of San Franscisco, State of California, United
>> States) vs. telephone;e-geopolitical-us-ca-sm-rwc (Redwood City,
>> County of San Mateo, State of California, United States).
>
>I don't quite follow this.  Do you mean that slapd.conf would
>configure a list of prefixes (in this case just "e-geopolitical-")
>which would work the same way as "lang-"?

Yes.  Basically, have a directive like:

tagOptionPrefixes "lang-" "e-geopolitical-" "e-user-"

which would all be treated as language/range options are treated
today.

>>>> That is, these options are just like language options, they
>>>> are both "tagging" options.  The code should treat them the
>>>> same.
>>>
>>>I suppose so, but isn't the language code rather slow?
>> 
>> Maybe.  The code may be doing more.
>
>Yes, it supports ranges too, and an unlimited number of tags.
>I don't know if we need that for user-defined options, though.

Fair enough.

I note that in implementing either (or both) approaches, be
sure that options are generating in ascending order in all
attribute descriptions produced.   Also, these user-defined
options should all be treated as "tagging" options (per
draft-ietf-ldapbis-models-xx.txt) in terms of attribute hierarchy
and other models aspects.