Handling a multi-value attribute question

[Michael A Grady]

At Illinois (my institutional home for many years) givenName was a multi-valued attribute (certainly defined as such in the standard schema), but we also maintained a local attribute that was the singly valued "official first name". And, in the context of all of our attribute release for federated partners, we'd encode/release that local attribute as the value for the standard givenName field -- since no partners actually wanted the multi-valued field. Not sure why this particular school would insist on releasing the multi-valued form unless they don't have an easy source of a singly-valued field, but that is, of course, up to them.

On Dec 6, 2012, at 9:03 AM, Cantor, Scott wrote:

> On 12/6/12 9:46 AM, "Mike Flynn" <shibbolethlynda at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> I am an SP and I have about 140 educational institutions that connect to
>> me via SAML.  We allow the passing of attributes to us to personalize the
>> user's experience on our site.  A typical set is MAIL, SN, GIVENNAME,
>> EPPN.  I have one school that passes
>> GIVENNAME with multiple values.  In a typical scenario where I get a
>> single value, it allows us to greet the user by name on the site as well
>> as personalize other elements.  In this instance, with multiple values,
>> how do I know which value to use?
> 
> Formally speaking, a multi-valued attribute doesn't have a sort order and
> you should be able to pick any value. If that bothers the source, then
> they need to revisit their use of multiple values.
> 
> Just because something can be multi- doesn't mean it has to be, and just
> because they populate it in LDAP for search doesn't mean they can't do
> something different for SAML.
> 
> So in essence, you can't be expected to do their work for them and if you
> handle multiple values appropriately (I.e., not displaying all of them),
> then you've done your part.
> 
> -- Scott
> 
> 
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--
Michael A. Grady
Senior IAM Consultant, Unicon, Inc.