OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

RPC and Other DCE Components
• Naming a profile
The leaf name of a profile should indicate the profile users; for example, for a
profile that serves the members of an accounting department, the following is an
effective leaf name:
accounting_profile
The following text describes the NSI begin, next, and done operations. NSI accesses a
variety of search and inquire operations that read NSI attributes in directory service
entries. An NSI attribute is an RPC-defined attribute of a directory service entry used
by the DCE RPC directory service interface. An NSI attribute stores one of the
following: binding information, object UUIDs, a group, or a profile. Reading
information from any attribute involves an equivalent set of search or inquire
operations; that is, an integral set of begin, next, and done operations. An RPC
application uses these operations as follows:
1. The application creates a directory service handle (a reference to the context of
the ensuing series of next operations) by calling an NSI begin operation.
2. The application calls the NSI next operation corresponding to the begin
operation one or more times. Each next operation returns another value or list of
values from the target RPC directory service attribute. For example, an
import_next operation returns binding information from a binding attribute and
an object from an object attribute.
3. The application deletes the directory service handle by calling the corresponding
NSI done operation.
Note: Search and inquire operations are also accessible interactively from
within the RPC control program.
Table 14-1 lists the NSI next operations used by RPC applications.
124245 Tandem Computers Incorporated 14− 25