Handling a multi-value attribute question

[Peter Schober]

* Michael A Grady <mgrady at unicon.net> [2012-12-06 16:08]:
> 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.

I completely missed that of those 140 institutions only a single one
is causing this issue. Talking to them then becomes the most obvious
choice, I'd say.
My comments were under the assumption that a large percentage of those
140 institutions were doing this.

I also fully agree with Michael (and Scott) that givenName & sn are
just fine as they are and if the institution doesn't like the choice
you've made (first/last/random value) than they should be limiting the
SAML attributes to a single value, no matter what's in their local
systems,
-peter