custom user profile items broken?

[Richard Jacob <richard.jacob@de.ibm.com>]

Hi all,

looking more briefly in the handling of custom profile items it seems to me
that it is a little bit confusing and inconsistent.

1. ServiceDescription has only ItemDescription for customUserProfileItems;
i.e. there is no type definition (like for example in model description)
2. PortletDescription only allows the portlet to declare which item names
(strings) it wants to receive
3. RegistrationData only allows the Consumer to declare which custom item
names it can provide
4. in the description of UserProfile we say that we *expect* the custom
items to be extensions and of type named strings, but they *could* be of
other types
5. there is no "customUserProfileItems" of type namedString[] in
UserProfile which would fit well with 1,2,3
6. In section 13 "User Information" we say "Consumers supplying additional
custom profile fields are encourage to publish a similar mapping between
userProfileItems and the custom fields". For me it reads that Consumers are
encouraged to map profile item names to (custom) profile items structure
they define.

Bottom line:
It seems that we are pretty inconsistent there and need either fixing the
structures or clarification or even both.

I think there are two options:
a. enable custom profile items to be of certain types (then we need qnames,
type definitions, etc.) - they could be model descriptions
b. provide a simple name - value pair mechanism where custom profile items
can be provided. This would for me basically mean to extend the UserProfile
type to contain an additional field "customUserProfileItems" of type
NamedString[].

I would prefer b. since I think a. is quite an overkill.
If we choose b. we need to fix 4. and 6. and user profile items related
sections.

I'm happy to receive your opinions :-)

Mit freundlichen Gruessen / best regards,

        Richard Jacob
______________________________________________________
IBM Lab Boeblingen, Germany
Dept.8288, WebSphere Portal Server Development
WSRP Standardization Technical Lead
Phone: ++49 7031 16-3469  -  Fax: ++49 7031 16-4888
Email: mailto:richard.jacob@de.ibm.com