[kmip] Application Specific Information: 'Application Data' should be optional

["Featherstone, David" <David.Featherstone@safenet-inc.com>]

Greetings

 

An inconsistency exists in the KMIP specification’s description of the Application Specific Information attribute. On one hand, the body of the description says that the Application Data element can be omitted. On the other hand, the tabular summary description of this attribute states that the Application Data element is required.

 

3.36 Application Specific Information

The Application Specific Information attribute is a structure (see Table 120) used to store data specific to

the application(s) using the Managed Object. It consists of the following fields: an Application Namespace

and Application Data specific to that application namespace.

Clients MAY request to set (i.e., using any of the operations that result in new Managed Object(s) on the

server or adding/modifying the attribute of an existing Managed Object) an instance of this attribute with a

particular Application Namespace while omitting Application Data. In that case, if the server supports this

namespace (as indicated by the Query operation in Section 4.25), then it SHALL return a suitable

Application Data value. If the server does not support this namespace, then an error SHALL be returned.

 

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

|     O b j e c t      |   E n c o d i n g   |   R E Q U I R E D    |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

| Application          | Structure           |                      |

| Specific Information |                     |                      |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

|          Application |         Text String |  Yes                 |

|            Namespace |                     |                      |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

|          Application |         Text String |  Yes                 |

|                 Data |                     |                      |

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Table 99: Application Specific Information Attribute

 

I understand that some implementations interpret “omitted” to mean the null, or empty string, but that is not the general intent of the term [as used elsewhere in specification – e.g. Table 144 Register Attribute Requirements].

 

The Application Data element should be marked as optional [i.e. REQUIRED=No] in the table, with a qualifier for backwards compatibility:

 

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

|     O b j e c t      |   E n c o d i n g   |   R E Q U I R E D    |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

| Application          | Structure           |                      |

| Specific Information |                     |                      |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

|          Application |         Text String |  Yes                 |

|            Namespace |                     |                      |

+----------------------+---------------------+----------------------+

|          Application |         Text String |  No - may be omitted |

|                 Data |                     |  or null (empty)     |

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Table 99: Application Specific Information Attribute

 

Cheers,

… Dave

 

 

 

 

 

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