[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

Re: Empty DN ("") String Value?

Howard Chu wrote:
Jon Roberts wrote: 
Since there is a no-argument constructor DN(), perhaps the original
thinking was that null and the rootDSE "" are synonymous. On the other
hand, the existence of this constructor makes as much sense to me as the
redundant addRDN() and addRDNToFront() methods (ie. none at all). I
suppose *somebody* may want to build a DN instance iteratively, but I
would consider it easier to do so concatenating strings for submission
to the more relevant constructor with argument.

Sounds like someone was making a (perhaps futile) stab at instilling the concept that DNs are honest-to-god sequences of structured data. A good goal, at least.

I agree, and as I said I can see where somebody would use that idea. The pointless constructor and redundant methods are still bad. I would guess the OpenLDAP C code does not contain many examples of procedures with different names that do the exact same thing line for line, but I could be wrong.

This exercise in software archeology underscores a major reason I think
JLDAP is latent: a lot of cruft but nobody of original authorship to
explain or clean it up. As for the rest of us, if nobody touches it
nobody breaks it, so there it sits. My 2c.

Keep putting in your 2c. It obviously needs more feedback from more people with real operational experience using it.

Absolutely! I've only earned a couple hundred thousand dollars from my operational experiences with JLDAP. Unfortunately, besides Marc those many other voices don't speak much about the Java LDAP code anymore, neither here nor at Novell's mailing JLDAP list. You yourself have said more about my work in your concise responses over the years than any of them. Hence, I've become accustomed to living in feedback deficit.

And as for Marc's plan to change the toString() method to return "", I would have preferred the approach Michael implied where null means an undefined instance and "" is the RootDSE (an honest-to-god node in the DSE). I'll have some time, so I'd be happy to clean up the whole class over the next few weeks if nobody objects (and if my privileges are still valid?).

Jon Roberts
www.mentata.com