user profile proposal

["Andre Kramer" <andre.kramer@eu.citrix.com>]

Title: user profile proposal

The following should allow alternative types of profile data to flow, making our old P3P based information one example of such profile descriptions:

In 1.0 we had:

<complexType name="UserContext">

   <sequence>

        <element name="userContextKey" type="xsd:string" />

        <element name="userCategories" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" />

        <element name="profile" type="types:UserProfile" minOccurs="0" />

        <element name="extensions" type="types:Extension" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" />

   </sequence>

</complexType>

<element name="UserContext" type="types:UserContext" />

Proposal: Replace "profile" element in above with a "profiles" element (note different type and that mulitple occurances are now allowed):

<element name="profiles" type="types:Profile" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" />

Where the new Profile type is defined as follows:

<complexType name="Profile">

   <sequence>

        <any />

   </sequence>

</complexType>

We would also define a global  "userProfile" element, as well as keep the (P3P) UserProfile type in our schema (could move UserProfile to separate useful types xsd):

<element name="userProfile" type="types:UserProfile"/>

This allows 0, 1 or many profiles to be communicated in the user context in <profiles> elements. The understanding is that all such profiles relate to the user. A specific usage is to communicate the 1.0 UserProfile data. This would now be carried in an element named "profiles" :

<userContext>

   ...

   <profiles>

        <userProfile> … 1.0 P3P stuff  ...</userProfile> <!-- note that userProfile element is NOT required to be here but some XML is. -->

   </profiles>

   …

   <extensions> … </extensions> ...

</userContext>

Possible types of profiles can be listed using ServiceDescription.customUserProfileItemDescriptions and RegistrationData.customUserProfileData. On reflection, I strongly prefer not to attempt to provide more meta data in the protocol related to user profiles. If a XML processor recognizes the namespaced elements it will already have the schema (if defined).

Regards,

Andre