2 Individual Submission to LDAPExt Working Group R. Harrison
3 Internet Draft Novell, Inc.
4 Document: draft-rharrison-ldap-extpartresp-01.txt June, 2000
5 Category: Proposed Standard
8 Extended Partial Response
9 Protocol Enhancement to LDAP v3
14 This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
15 all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 [1].
17 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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33 This document describes the ExtendedPartialResponse, an element of
34 LDAP v3 protocol which allows multiple responses to LDAP v3 extended
35 requests. Extended partial responses are backward compatible with
36 the existing LDAP v3 Extended Operation defined in [LDAPv3].
38 2. Conventions used in this document
40 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
41 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in
42 this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
45 3. Motivation for the Extended Partial Response
47 The Extended Operation ([LDAPv3] Section 4.12) was defined in LDAP
48 v3 to allow additional operations to be defined as part of the
49 protocol without requiring a new revision of the protocol.
51 The LDAP v3 Extended Operation allows for a single extended response
52 to each extended request, but this paradigm may not be sufficient
53 for some directory operations. For instance, the LDAP search
54 operation is a directory operation that is much more efficient when
55 multiple partial responses are used to service a single request. The
57 LDAP v3 Extended Partial Response June, 2000
60 extended partial response generalizes the current extended operation
61 definition to give LDAP server implementers the ability to make use
62 of a single-request-multiple-response paradigm for extended LDAP
63 operations that require it or that would benefit from it.
65 4. Element of Protocol
67 The ExtendedPartialResponse is defined as
69 ExtendedPartialResponse ::= [APPLICATION 25] SEQUENCE {
70 responseName [0] LDAPOID OPTIONAL,
71 response [1] OCTET STRING OPTIONAL }
73 An LDAP server responds to an LDAP v3 ExtendedRequest with zero or
74 more ExtendedPartialResponses followed by one ExtendedResponse. This
75 ensures backward compatibility with existing LDAP extensions which
76 do not make use of the ExtendedPartialResponse. As with all LDAP
77 extensions, LDAP extensions that make use of the
78 ExtendedPartialResponse have predefined syntax and semantics that
79 are defined in RFCs or are private to a particular implementation.
81 5. Security Considerations
83 This draft describes an enhancement to the LDAP v3 protocol
84 [LDAPv3]. All security considerations of [LDAPv3] apply to this
85 draft, however it does not introduce any new security considerations
86 to the LDAP v3 protocol.
91 Wahl, M., Howes, T., and S. Kille, "Lightweight Directory
92 Access Protocol (v3)", RFC 2251, December 1997.
95 Scott Bradner. "Key Words for use in RFCs to Indicate
96 Requirement Levels". RFC 2119.
101 The author would like to acknowledge the readers of the LDAP
102 Extensions working group mail list who responded to the suggestion
103 that a multiple-response paradigm might be useful for LDAP extended
104 requests. Special thanks go to two individuals: David Wilbur who
105 first introduced the idea on the working group list, and Thomas
106 Salter, who succinctly summarized the discussion and suggested the
107 name ExtendedPartialResponse in his summary.
109 8. Author's Addresses
114 LDAP v3 Extended Partial Response June, 2000
120 roger_harrison@novell.com
123 Appendix A - Document Revision History
125 A.1 draft-rharrison-ldap-extPartResp-00.doc
127 Initial revision of draft.
129 A.2 draft-rharrison-ldap-extPartResp-01.doc
131 Changed responseName to be optional to align with [LDAPv3]
132 definition of ExtendedResponse.
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