Re: [xdi] XDI collection as attribute

["Le Van Gong, Hubert" <Hubert.LeVanGong@neustar.biz>]

Thanks,

My ultimate goal is to be able (programmatically) to distinguish entity collections from attribute collections since I understand (please confirm!) that the former should be represented with a circle (i.e. like an entity) whereas the latter will be a diamond (i.e. attribute).

Parsing the ABNF, it seems an attribute collection will always look like: [<+name>] or [<$name>]

while an entity collection will never start with [< nor end with >]

Am I correct?

Note that the legal collection ABNF def seems weird to me as I interpret it as: [@]

Shouldn't there be an XDI name after the '@' ?

In which case, the definition should be:

legal-collection     = COLL             "@" xdi-name COLR

or something like that...

Thanks,

Hubert

 

On Sep 15, 2014, at 9:05 PM, =Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Le Van Gong, Hubert <Hubert.LeVanGong@neustar.biz> wrote:

Andy recently mentioned a bug in the XDI graph editor where collections are not represented using a diamond (attribute).

As I'm trying to determine the appropriate pattern for collections, I started reading the XDI ABNF and came up with some questions: what type of collections *must* be represented as an attribute?

For instance, should we represent an authority-collection (i.e. a person-collection or a legal-collection) as an attribute?

Hubert, there are only two types of collections: entity collections and attribute collections. Authorities (persons, legal, general) are just subtypes of entities. The existing ABNF may not make that clear enough, which leads us to...

 

Also, can someone confirm https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf is up to date?

It's not. I just put the most recent top-level ABNF at the top of the ABNF Discussion page. Hopefully this makes it much clearer that there are only entity collections and attribute collections. The former should be represented in the visual graph notation as filled circles; the latter as filled diamonds.

Thanks,

=Drummond  

--

Hubert A. Le Van Gong

Distinguished Engineer, Technology Foundry
San Jose, CA 95129
USA
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=hubert

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