[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH 0236] ipaldap: Fallback to string if datetime conversion went wrong

[Jan Cholasta]

On 26.6.2014 09:21, Petr Viktorin wrote:
> On 06/26/2014 08:30 AM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>> On 25.6.2014 18:25, Petr Viktorin wrote:
>>> On 06/25/2014 05:29 PM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> On 25.6.2014 17:17, Tomas Babej wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Our datetime conversion does not support full LDAP Generalized
>>>>> time syntax. In the unsupported cases, we should fall back
>>>>> to string representation of the attribute.
>>>>>
>>>>> In particular, '0' is used to denote no value of LDAP generalized
>>>>> time attribute.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/4350
>>>>
>>>> NACK, this beats the purpose of decoding of the values, because it
>>>> requires you to check the type of the value before using it.
>>>>
>>>> Instead, you should either fix the code that uses the
>>>> nsds5ReplicaLastUpdate{Start,End} attributes to access their raw value
>>>> directly, or exclude the attributes from decoding to datetime by
>>>> overriding their type in IPASimpleLDAPObject._SYNTAX_OVERRIDE.
>>>>
>>>> Honza
>>>>
>>>
>>> I agree that just returning a string when conversion fails is the wrong
>>> thing to do.
>>>
>>> I think that if LDAP generalized can contain the empty/invalid value, we
>>> should convert the '0' to what Python uses for that -- None.
>>>
>>
>> But None already means "empty attribute".
>
> I don't think you can get [None] currently, can you? None is the default
> default for get(), but I don't think that's a problem.
>

You can't, but you can get it from single_value when the attribute is 
empty or assign it to an attribute to make it empty.

I would very much prefer if we avoided None, because it will only create 
mess and possibly some hard to catch errors.

-- 
Jan Cholasta