Zhang Weiwu wrote:
The misuse of this is first introduced by being able to have multiple values of telephone number, where we always put the primary number the first one and it worked several years.
against the specs, which warned you about not relying on this.
Later we used businessCategory which also have strict order requirements and that worked several years.
same as above.
So I begin to think I can do the same to companyRepresentative. Call me stupid or having not learnt true spirit of LDAP, I learn by starting with some theory
actually, the theory taught you not to do so.
and complete most of the theory with self experience, this worked with almost all other IT systems except LDAP. I don't know why. In LDAP world things often arranged different than my understanding.
Trial and error may be good when you have no alternatives. I understand LDAP may have a steep learning curve when non-trivial things need to be dealt with. So I'd recommend you take this opportunity to give up "bad habits based on experience" and try to stick with specs, instead of trying to force OpenLDAP into letting you preserve them.
In the LDAP world, you'd need to define your own "myPreferredTelephoneNumber" and put the preferred telephone number there as well as in the telephoneNumber, so that it can be collected both ways. Or, if the dumbest client you need to stick with is the one that wants the preferred number in the telephoneNumber attribute, leave it there, and add a "myAlternateTelephoneNumber" containing the perferred as well as the non preferred ones.
Going down the X-ORDERED trail would probably mean lots of pain. We needed to introduce it as a quick and reliable way to force ordering for internal purposes, but it is very unlikely that normal clients (I mean: clients whose sources you can't or don't want to modify) will be willing to cooperate with it.
p.
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