[Fedora-directory-users] Proposed new features for 1.3

[Andrey Ivanov]

>
>        * support of other virtual attributes generated "on the fly"
>>
>>    Can you explain this a little more?
>>
>>
>> For example, the memberOf attribute now generated by memberOf plugin and
>> written into the db could be generated dynamically.
>>
> For the particular case of memberOf, we decided against using virtual
> attributes.  One reason is that it's harder to do filtering/indexing on
> virtual attributes e.g. supporting searches like (memberof=somegroup).

Yes, i remember this reasoning - i was following quite closely the
development of this plug-in as it was sine qua non for our production
environment...


>
>  The attributes like entryLevelRights and attributeLevelRights are already
>> created dynamically, nsRole/CoS also (one of the main drawbacks of the roles
>> is that they are only applicable to a sub-tree).
>>
> One of the drawbacks of groups is that they do not apply to the sub-tree -
> makes it difficult in general to replicate them.  Roles/CoS are scoped along
> with the data they apply to, so they go along with replication quite easily.

Yep.You're talking about the drawbacks concerning the difficulty of the code
development.  But for us the sub-tree application that was an essential
limitation of Roles - we couldn't use it to make the same thing as memberof,
that's why i was looking forward eagerly for the memberof  plugin...


>  I'm talking about this type of "virtual" attributes generated by some
>> filters or regular expressions or plug-ins, maybe creation of some sort of
>> framework or mechanism to generalize the creation of such attribiutes.
>>
> There already is a framework, but not many want to delve into the C code.
>
> Can you provide some examples of what you mean?

For example, automatic generation of a virtual attribute describing the
location (or type) of the person by applying regex to his/her
telephoneNumber (first n digits). But then again you are right about
indexing and filters with these attributes... Another example: in our
production environment we have a "ou" attribute containing the DNs of the
units where the person belongs. It would be nice to convert it automatically
to an attribute "displayOu" with slashes instead of ",ou=":

ou: ou=lpp,ou=lab,ou=dgar,ou=dg,ou=organisation,dc=example,dc=com
displayOu: LPP/LAB/DGAR/DG

Today we are using scripts. This type of attribute conversion can easily be
made inside an application if you write it internally, otherwise one needs
to add this type of "converted" attributes...
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