RE: [saml-dev] Indexed Endpoints

["Scott Cantor" <cantor.2@osu.edu>]

> Can anyone enlighten me on what the intent of indexed 
> endpoints was?  Honestly, I just don't see how or why it 
> would be used.

Which ones? There are a couple of different occurrences, for different
reasons.

In the artifact case, it's the only thing that makes the artifact binding
usable without a ridiculous amount of work (reason number one I hated
artifacts in 1.1). Without it, even the simplest implementation needs
efficient, writable, clustered storage to load balance the IdP. With it, you
can issue artifacts that point directly back at the endpoint with the
in-memory storage of the protocol message.

In the SP case, as it was in ID-FF, it's to enable compact referencing of
the consumer service to use in the AuthnRequest without having to put the
whole URL in the request. In fact, the AssertionConsumerServiceURL attribute
is mostly worthless since you need to check metadata in most cases anyway,
and I should have just removed it altogether.

-- Scott