Individual Submission to LDAPExt Working Group R. Harrison Internet Draft Novell, Inc. Document: draft-rharrison-ldap-extpartresp-01.txt June, 2000 Category: Proposed Standard Extended Partial Response Protocol Enhancement to LDAP v3 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 [1]. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. 1. Abstract This document describes the ExtendedPartialResponse, an element of LDAP v3 protocol which allows multiple responses to LDAP v3 extended requests. Extended partial responses are backward compatible with the existing LDAP v3 Extended Operation defined in [LDAPv3]. 2. Conventions used in this document The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. 3. Motivation for the Extended Partial Response The Extended Operation ([LDAPv3] Section 4.12) was defined in LDAP v3 to allow additional operations to be defined as part of the protocol without requiring a new revision of the protocol. The LDAP v3 Extended Operation allows for a single extended response to each extended request, but this paradigm may not be sufficient for some directory operations. For instance, the LDAP search operation is a directory operation that is much more efficient when multiple partial responses are used to service a single request. The LDAP v3 Extended Partial Response June, 2000 extended partial response generalizes the current extended operation definition to give LDAP server implementers the ability to make use of a single-request-multiple-response paradigm for extended LDAP operations that require it or that would benefit from it. 4. Element of Protocol The ExtendedPartialResponse is defined as ExtendedPartialResponse ::= [APPLICATION 25] SEQUENCE { responseName [0] LDAPOID OPTIONAL, response [1] OCTET STRING OPTIONAL } An LDAP server responds to an LDAP v3 ExtendedRequest with zero or more ExtendedPartialResponses followed by one ExtendedResponse. This ensures backward compatibility with existing LDAP extensions which do not make use of the ExtendedPartialResponse. As with all LDAP extensions, LDAP extensions that make use of the ExtendedPartialResponse have predefined syntax and semantics that are defined in RFCs or are private to a particular implementation. 5. Security Considerations This draft describes an enhancement to the LDAP v3 protocol [LDAPv3]. All security considerations of [LDAPv3] apply to this draft, however it does not introduce any new security considerations to the LDAP v3 protocol. 6. References [LDAPv3] Wahl, M., Howes, T., and S. Kille, "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)", RFC 2251, December 1997. [ReqsKeywords] Scott Bradner. "Key Words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels". RFC 2119. 7. Acknowledgments The author would like to acknowledge the readers of the LDAP Extensions working group mail list who responded to the suggestion that a multiple-response paradigm might be useful for LDAP extended requests. Special thanks go to two individuals: David Wilbur who first introduced the idea on the working group list, and Thomas Salter, who succinctly summarized the discussion and suggested the name ExtendedPartialResponse in his summary. 8. Author's Addresses Roger Harrison Novell, Inc. LDAP v3 Extended Partial Response June, 2000 1800 S. Novell Place Provo, UT 84606 +1 801 861 2642 roger_harrison@novell.com Appendix A - Document Revision History A.1 draft-rharrison-ldap-extPartResp-00.doc Initial revision of draft. A.2 draft-rharrison-ldap-extPartResp-01.doc Changed responseName to be optional to align with [LDAPv3] definition of ExtendedResponse. Full Copyright Statement "Copyright (C) The Internet Society (date). All Rights Reserved. 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