OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Introduction and Style Guide

OSF DCE Application Development Guide—Introduction and Style Guide
group entry
Contains a group attribute.
profile entry
Contains a profile attribute.
There are no official names for hybrid entries that contain other combinations of
attributes, which is perhaps another reason for not creating such entries.
The general name for entries that contain any of these attributes is NSI entries, since they
are a by-product and tool of the NSI DCE RPC library routines.
5.4.2 CDSEntry Attributes
Within the DCE Directory Service, entry attributes such as the four previously described
attributes are identified by object identifiers (OIDs). This is an exception to the general
rule that things in DCE are identified by UUID.
OIDs are not seen by applications that restrict themselves to using only the name service
routines (rpc_ns_*()), but these identifiers are important for applications that use the
X/Open Directory Services (XDS) interface to create new attributes for use with
namespace entries.
As was seen in the immediately preceding sections, the name service makes use of only
four different entry attributes in various application-specified or administrator-specified
combinations. CDS, however, contains definitions for many more than these, and
attributes from this supply of already existing ones can be added by applications to NSI
entries through the XDS interface. Attributes that already exist are already properly
identified, so applications that use these attributes do not have to concern themselves
with the OIDs, except to the extent of making sure that they handle them properly.
A further possibility is that an application requires new attributes for use with namespace
entries. Such attributes can be created using the XDS interface. When it creates new
attributes, the application is responsible for tagging them with new, properly allocated
OIDs.
Unlike UUIDs, OIDs are not generated by command or function call. They originate
from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which allocates them in
hierarchically organized blocks to recipients. Each recipient (typically an organization of
some kind) is then responsible for ensuring that the OIDs it received are used uniquely.
For example, the following OID identifies the NSI profile entry attribute. This number
was assigned by the Open Software Foundation out of a block of numbers, beginning
with the digits 1.3.22, which was allocated to it by ISO, and OSF is responsible for
making sure that 1.3.22.1.1.4 is not used to identify any other attribute.
1.3.22.1.1.4
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