Erik Lax wrote:

It's building a custom LDAPDN object from an internal data structure to be used with ldap_dn2str(). The use-case for such flag/pointer ownership for others may be limited as I suspect not so many build their own LDAPDN objects from scratch.

That doesn't matter. You still aren't going to be constructing from an open ended set of RDN attributeTypes. Make them constants and forget about it.

Regards Erik

On 2018-11-30 16:11, Howard Chu wrote:

...

Erik Lax wrote:

...

In our case the pointer/allocated string ownership is preferable moved to the LDAPAVA object for both the value and attribute as the char* does not have the same lifetime as the LDAPAVA object.

Then your app is almost certainly mis-designed. The set of attributeTypes in a schema is always finite and usually small; alloc'ing and free'ing the same strings over and over is foolish.

Out of curiosity, what is your software actually trying to do?

...

Regards Erik

On 2018-11-30 14:51, Howard Chu wrote:

...

erik@halon.se wrote:

...

Full_Name: Erik Lax Version: 2.4.46 OS: Linux URL: Submission from: (NULL) (212.85.68.184)

Hi,

It's possible to set the flag LDAP_AVA_FREE_VALUE to clear ber values on the LDAPAVA structure in ldapava_free() but it's not possible to set the LDAP_AVA_FREE_ATTR to clear attributes. I suspect OpenLDAP internals does not need to free attributes in this way (hence the missing code).

Attribute Types are usually constant strings, so right, there should be no need to free them.

...

I'm building a custom LDAPAVA (LDAPDN) object and it would be useful to be able to set this flags to have it properly clean up both values and attributes in ldap_dnfree().

It would be better to simply avoid the need to free them.