Re: renaming an entry referenced in another object

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

At 08:52 AM 9/17/2004, François Beretti wrote:
>Ok, I respect this choice. Is there a plugin for slapd that could handle such a behavior ?

There is a plugin, I believe called refint (in HEAD), which
tries to provide this kind of behavior.  Obviously, given
the distributed nature of LDAP/X.500 directories, it cannot
provide complete integrity of references for the general case.
Also, given that DN values may be embedded in complex types,
including digital signed types, a complete update DN would
be difficult and problematic.  And, of course, the plugin
cannot do anything about DNs stored outside the directory.
And this implies that if you do rely of such a plugin, you
will face a number of problems if you ever decide to deploy
a distributed directory.

In the LDAP/X.500 model, one should first try to avoid
renaming problems by simply avoiding renaming and then, when
renaming is absolutely necessary, use alias and referral
objects to refer applications to the new entry name.
Also, using some sort of indirection location method in
applications can make them immune to renaming issues.
For instance, locating objects by UUID instead of name
will make the application immune to name changes.

Kurt