[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH] Change the behaviour of addattr/setattr parameters

[Pavel Zůna]

On 2010-08-12 14:38, Rob Crittenden wrote:
> Pavel Zůna wrote:
>> On 2010-08-12 04:46, Rob Crittenden wrote:
>>> Pavel Zůna wrote:
>>>> setattr and addattr can now be used both to set all values of
>>>> ANY attribute. the last setattr always resets the attribute to
>>>> the specified value and all addattr append to it.
>>>>
>>>> Examples:
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=msc
>>>> title: msc
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=msb
>>>> title: msb
>>>> user-mod testuser --addattr=title=msc
>>>> title: msb, msc
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=
>>>> title:
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=msc --addattr=msb
>>>> title: msc, msb
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=ing --addattr=bc
>>>> title: ing, bc
>>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=title=doc
>>>> title: doc
>>>>
>>>> It's not very user friendly, but it's going to be used very very
>>>> rarely in special conditions in the CLI and we can use it to save
>>>> lots of JSON-RPC roundtrips in the webUI.
>>>>
>>>> Pavel
>>>
>>> It was my intention when I added addattr and setattr that one couldn't
>>> set already-defined params this way. They were silently ignored. So you
>>> couldn't do:
>>>
>>> user-mod testuser --setattr=givenname=Jeff
>>>
>>> This would be possible with this patch. Was that intentional?
>>>
>>> BTW I have the start of a test suite for this functionality.
>>>
>>> rob
>>
>> Yes, it is intentional. I forgot to mention it in the description. I'm
>> using setattr/addattr for everything in the webUI - it makes the code a
>> lot simpler.
>
> Doesn't that invalidate all the validators we have in the plugins? This
> is why I disallowed it.
>
> rob

It does, but I see these options as something only experienced users, 
who need to set something we don't support directly, will use. Sometimes 
they might want to disable the validators, if they know what they're 
doing. We could also make the setattr/addattr handler in frontend.py 
detect if a there's a validator available and use it.

Validators in the webUI is still something we need to figure out. Adam 
was proposing having validators in the form of regex strings, which is 
not a bad idea as it's easy to implement on any platform/language. On 
the other hand, I don't know if it's good enough for all parameters we have.

Hmm. There's a lot to think about here actually. I'll make it my 
homework for the weekend. :)

Pavel