RFC 1837 (rfc1837) - Page 3 of 7

Representing Tables and Subtrees in the X

RFC 1837                 Representing Subtrees               August 1995


    SUBTYPE OF name                                                 20
    WITH SYNTAX DirectoryString {ub-name}
    ID at-text-table-key}

textTableValue ATTRIBUTE ::= {
    SUBTYPE OF name
    WITH SYNTAX  DirectoryString {ub-description}
    ID at-text-table-value}

distinguishedNameTableEntry OBJECT-CLASS ::= {
    SUBCLASS OF {tableEntry}                                        30
    MUST CONTAIN {distinguishedNameTableKey}
    ID oc-distinguished-name-table-entry}

distinguishedNameTableKey ATTRIBUTE ::= {
    SUBTYPE OF distinguishedName
    ID at-distinguished-name-table-key}

                     Figure 1:  Representing Tables


1.  TextEntry, which define table entries with text keys, which may
    have single or multiple values of any type.  An attribute is
    defined to allow a text value, to support the frequent text key to
    text value mapping.  Additional values may be defined.

2.  DistinguishedNameEntry.  This is used for associating information
    with globally defined objects.  This approach should be used where
    the number of objects in the table is small or very sparsely
    spread over the DIT. In other cases where there are many objects
    or the objects are tightly clustered in the DIT, the subtree
    approach defined in Section 2 will be preferable.  No value
    attributes are defined for this type of entry.  An application of
    this will make appropriate subtyping to define the needed values.

This is best illustrated by example.  Consider the MTA:


CN=Bells, OU=Computer Science,
O=University College London, C=GB

Suppose that the MTA needs a table mapping from private keys to fully
qualified domain names (this example is fictitious).  The table might
be named as:

CN=domain-nicknames,
CN=Bells, OU=Computer Science,
O=University College London, C=GB



Kille                         Experimental