matching mdrpi elements in attribute filter? xpath?

[Ian Young]

On 6 Apr 2013, at 12:36, Peter Schober <peter.schober at univie.ac.at> wrote:

> I wanted to ask what the chances were of getting something into 2.4

Well, with my Shib project hat on, I'd note that Scott's announcement said this:

> We believe this is feature and code complete, so it's something of a
> release candidate.

In general, I'd suggest people read that as implying that it's rather late in the cycle to be thinking up new features ;-)

> (or what your thoughts are on this generally) that allowed matching on
> mdrpi:RegistrationInfo/@registrationAuthority attributes in the
> attribute filter.

Having said that, with my UKf hat on, I can immediately see why you'd be interested in that ability and can see that it would be beneficial for us as well.  I think I had just got out of the habit of thinking about potential enhancements in V2.x.

> Maybe having a generic facility to evaluate xpath expressions would
> help with this and many other cases?

I've found XPath to be extremely useful in the MDA context for matching "random stuff in the XML" when there isn't a more structured way of doing it.  I think both a generic XPath match and a more specific registrationAuthority match would find uses, particularly in federations who are starting to republish metadata imported from partners.

> If others find that useful I can at least add a case in Jira for that.

You should certainly do this.  I think the chances of seeing this in V2.4.0 are very low or zero, but assuming that the appropriate APIs are there (and I think they probably are) then maybe we (by which I mean you and I and the rest of the community interested in inter-federation metadata exchange) can think about a contributed extension post-2.4, in the same way that the UKf developed the https://github.com/ukf/ua-attribute-idp-ext extension.

Just for completeness, the other thing you can potentially do as a federation operator is to transform registrationAuthority into a locally-defined entity attribute, and match on that.  Ugly short-term hacks, my speciality.

	-- Ian

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