Attribute values

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker@verisign.com>]

At present the specification of Attribute effectively forces the inclusion
of another schema to specify the schema value:

	<element name="AttributeValue" type="saml:AttributeValueType"/>
	<complexType name="AttributeValueType">
		<sequence>
			<any namespace="##any" processContents="lax" 
					minOccurs="0"
maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
		</sequence>
	</complexType>


I would like to add in the following so that string values can be sepecified
without the need to add an extension schema in for that purpose:

	<element name="AttributeValue" type="saml:AttributeValueType"/>
	<complexType name="AttributeValueType">
		<choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
			<element ref="saml:StringValue"/>
			<any namespace="##any" processContents="lax" >
		</choice>
	</complexType>

	<element name="StringValue" type="string"/>

The forced inclusion of the attribute value actually resolves an earlier
discussion, what if the attribute label itself is all you need? I.e. is
Alice a manager?

In such cases an implementation that would fit better with our scheme is to
consider the designator to be a variable name, so we would query whether the
value of the attribute for alice is true or false:

<Attribute namespace="urn:tbs:xmltrustcenter.org:2001-10-01:13"
	name="Manager">
   <AttributeValue>
      <StringValue>true</StringValue>
   </AttributeValue>
</Attribute>


Hmm, perhaps should define elements for boolean, integer and string values
to keep the schema typing clean. Don't want to be doing ad hoc conversions.

Alternatively, maybe attributes would work better???

<Attribute namespace="urn:tbs:xmltrustcenter.org:2001-10-01:13"
	name="Manager" BooleanValue="true"/>

		Phill

Phillip Hallam-Baker FBCS C.Eng.
Principal Scientist
VeriSign Inc.
pbaker@verisign.com
781 245 6996 x227

Phillip Hallam-Baker (E-mail).vcf