RE: DAML, DirXML, DSML 2.0 - let the fun begin

[Andy Harjanto <andyhar@Exchange.Microsoft.com>]

Thanks Rob for summarizing this. This is great. 

We (Microsoft) will submit a new proposal soon to this mailing list. The
proposal will focus primarily on LDAP operations. It does not attempt to
expose XPath/XQuery functionalities. 

IMHO, mapping LDAP Filter to XPath/XQuery is another interesting topic.
One idea is to issue an XPath/XQuery query to a directoy service. The
directory service, then, returns back as a DSMLv1.0 document (and
possibly with its XML-Schema definition). Again, there are few
challenges, as you pointed out, to map directory schema into XML-Schema.



-Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Weltman [mailto:robw@coscend.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 9:13 PM
To: dsml@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: DAML, DirXML, DSML 2.0 - let the fun begin


  After a hiatus of a few months, it's time to restart the discussions
on the goals and direction of DSML 2.0. When we last met (virtually
speaking), Andy Harjanto of Microsoft had put together a strawman
proposal for what DSML 2.0 could look like. 
  See:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dsml/200010/msg00004.html

and the discussion that followed (Samples...) in:

   http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dsml/200011/maillist.html

  The two main focus points of the discussions were:

- Can LDAP's aggregation of object classes in an entry be represented in
XML in a way that is compatible with XML Schema, with higher-level
object rendering than DSML 1.0 (which was pretty much a transliteration
of LDIF into XML)?

- Should LDAP operations (add, modify, delete, moddn, search) be
represented as XML elements, or is it possible/desirable to express them
as XPath/DOM operations on a directory as a virtual XML document?

  Andy's proposal didn't solve the first problem, and adopted the
"operation as XML element" approach to the second one. Examples:

<MyCompany  rdn="OU=MyCompany"  dn="..." description="..." class="...">
    <SalesAndMarketing rdn="OU=SalesAndMarketing"  homePage="..."
class="...">
         <Consulting  rdn="CN=Consulting" >
         </Consulting>
   </SalesAndMarketing>
   <ResearchAndDevelopment rdn="OU=ResearchAndDevelopment"
description="...">
       <ProductX rdn="CN=ProductX"  startDate="01/02/1998">
       </ProductX>
       <ProductY rdn="CN=ProductX"  startDate="04/02/1999">
       </ProductY>
   </ResearchAndDevelopment>
</MyCompany>

  <update path="guid:a7fc61cc4661924e98f5316ff060baeb" >
     <sn>Gibbs</sn>
     <telephoneNumber op="delete">(425)777 7777</telephoneNumber>
     <telephoneNumber op="append">(206)999 9999</telephoneNumber>
     <telephoneNumber op="append">(425)888 8888</telephoneNumber>
  </update>
  <update path="dn:CN=JSmith, OU=Marketing, O=Example, C=US" >
     <sn>Gibbs</sn>
     <telephoneNumber op="delete">(523)777 7777</telephoneNumber>
  </update>

-----------------------------------------------------------------

  Fast forward to March 2001 and we have three new contributions:

DAML    http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dsml/200103/msg00003.html
DirXML  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dsml/200103/msg00004.html
XMLDAP  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dsml/200103/msg00001.html

  Here is my brief summary:

  DAML is an XML wire-level alternative to ASN.1 for LDAP. It's an
interesting idea, and it could have saved many of us a lot of difficult
debugging if it had been the wire protocol of choice for LDAP. But I'm
not sure where it fits in with application-level access to directory
data.

  DirXML is a more extensive language along the lines of DSML 1.0 (but
different) for representing directory entries and adopting the
"operation as XML element" approach for representing directory
operations. The submitted documents are HMTL versions of DTDs. It would
be nice to have an overview, or a complete sample document conforming to
the DTDs, but I think I see representations for all the LDAP operations
referenced in DTD-TREE.html. I don't see how you can express a search
other than exact match on an attribute value (e.g. no substring match),
though. DirXML looks (from the submitted DTDs) like a schema for
synchronization between an NDS directory and an application.

  XMLDAP is an XML gateway to LDAP - not in itself an XML language for
accessing directories. However it includes an XML tag library for
acessing LDAP directories using another "operation as XML element"
approach. XTL (XML Template Language, the language that includes LDAP
access tags) is used to inject directory data into an XML document as
part of page preparation (HTML, WML, other XML). XTL doesn't include an
XML representation of directory entries.

  Hopefully that was enough fuel to reignite the discussions on this
mailing list and get us moving towards (first milestone) a requirements
document.

Rob

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