Subject: referrals question

From: "Jim Sermersheim" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:35:45 -0600

All,

Currently, [Protocol] (Section 4.1.10) says: "If an alias was
dereferenced, the <dn> part of the URL MUST be present, with the new
target object name". This assumes that there is a <dn> part in the
referral URL. [Protocol] says that other kinds of URLs can be returned.
There are no requirements that all types of URLs contain a place for a
DN. So, if an alias is dereferenced while resolving a name, and the
referral contains non-LDAP URLs, is the server expected to:

a) not return those non-LDAP referrals?
b) only return non-LDAP referrals where the server knows the format,
the URL format allows a DN, and the server fills in the DN part
c) return the non-LDAP referrals as they exist in the data store (if
they exist at all), even if no knowledge of DN placement is known.

I note that another case where the server should provide the dn part is
where a reference object has been placed and the referral attribute has
the dn part populated (and that dn is different from the dn of the
reference object). If the name being resolved is subordinate to that
reference object, the dn of the referral(s) should reflect the DN held
in the referral attribute plus the unresolved portion of the original dn
on the operation.