Proposal: RIM Slot enhancements

[Diego Ballvé <diego.ballve@republica.fi>]

Some enhancement ideas regarding RIM Slots have came up during
regrep-cc-review work but since they are general improvements
to RIM I'm proposing them here. The current definition of RIM
Slot [1] has been also pasted below.

The enhancements:

1) The first point is to change the Slot.value attribute to an
"Ordered" Collection of LongName. A RIM Slot can have n values,
but currently the specification does not enforce the values'
order.

2) Once (1) is accepted, we could define some special values
for attribute slotType and extendend the semantics of Slot.
Based on the Slot.slotType, we could then decide wether to
handle Slot.values as:
- only 1 'short' string (values.size must be 1)
- many 'short' strings (1 per value)
- a 'long' string (catenate all values)
- many 'long' strings (catenate all values and tokenize)

These changes would allow a Slot to be able to store
more than a Collection of LongName, although the initial
Collection can still be stored.
 
A negative point might be the searches by Slot value. Would
they be able to understand these semantics?

Regards,
Diego 

--------------------------------------------
Diego Ballve
Product Manager
Republica Corp., Products
Survontie 9, 40500 Jyväskylä, Finland
E-mail: diego.ballve@republica.fi
http://www.republica.fi/
http://www.x-fetch.com/



[1] RIM Slot definition in RIM 2.5 Spec [2]

764 7.7 Class Slot
765 Slot instances provide a dynamic way to add arbitrary attributes to RegistryObject
766 instances. This ability to add attributes dynamically to RegistryObject instances enables
767 extensibility within the information model.
768
769 A RegistryObject may have 0 or more Slots. A slot is composed of a name, a slotType
770 and a collection of values.

774 7.7.2 Attribute name
775 Each Slot instance must have a name. The name is the primary means for identifying a
776 Slot instance within a RegistryObject. Consequently, the name of a Slot instance must be
777 locally unique within the RegistryObject instance.

778 7.7.3 Attribute slotType 
779 Each Slot instance may have a slotType that allows different slots to be grouped together.

780 7.7.4 Attribute values
781 A Slot instance must have a Collection of values. The collection of values may be empty.
782 Since a Slot represent an extensible attribute whose value may be a collection, therefore a
783 Slot is allowed to have a collection of values rather than a single value. 

[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/regrep/documents/2.5/specs/ebrim.2.5.pdf