What back-monitor does in many cases is monitoring entities living inside slapd. In those cases, the living entity and back-monitor's entry should be in touch with each other to account for reciprocal updating. The flow of information, so far, has been handled in one direction by providing a neutral interface (actually, two):
- the per-subsystem hooks - the callbacks
Callbacks are much more general than per-subsystem hooks. I think per-subsystem stuff should be eliminated, as they basically duplicate callbacks with less flexibility.
However, I believe bi-directional communication could make many things much easier.
Let's think what operations may require either direction: back-monitor needs to be able to ask living entries information when it is asked to present entries (e.g. in response to a search). For this purpose, the current callback mechanism should be sufficient.
However, living entities may need to contact back-monitor for many purposes: to register new callbacks, to add/remove themselves to/from back-monitor. For this latter purpose, a solution could be to augment all living entities with a pointer to their entry in back-monitor. This pointer should be set by back-monitor as soon as that entry is created. This would ease feature registration by acting as a key (the caller would finally know the real DN of its entry), rather than figuring out a mechanism to locate it as it is currently done by the monitor_back_register_* calls. Basically, BackendInfo, BackendDB, overlay_info and overlay_inst would need an (Entry * (*)_monitor) to their entry in back-monitor, to be mostly used as a key when calling monitor-related functions. Other structures in the future may need it, but the interface would be general enough to allow extensions. Comments?
p.
Ing. Pierangelo Masarati OpenLDAP Core Team
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