Re: [xacml] url/uri-string-concatenate

[Seth Proctor <Seth.Proctor@sun.com>]

FYI, I dredged up my notes on this question from several months ago  
when I tripped across it. The informal consensus was that the  
concatenation function is _not_ supposed to handle any specific  
properties of the URI scheme. That is, it is not responsible for  
adding characters like '/' or ':' or '%'.

In other words, the function takes a URI and a bunch of strings. The  
URI is effectively converted to a string, simple sting concatenation  
is done to append all the elements in order, and then the complete  
string is converted back to a URI. This does not have to be a URL.

For some reason, the consensus on the name was to use "url" instead  
of "uri" so this is what I implemented. That said, I don't care too  
much which name is used. Given that there's nothing URL-specific  
about the function, using "uri" for the name seems like a good idea  
to me.

<aside>
I've talked a little about this with Anne. I should have thought of  
it before 2.0, but, well, hindsight and all :) Rather than all these  
type-specific functions we introduced for regexp, concat, etc., it  
would probably make more sense just to have type-to-string functions  
(which are needed anyway to support XML encoding), especially since  
these functions essentially use these semantics. Maybe in the future  
we could consider adding this to make it easier
</aside>


seth