is the delimiter for multi-value attributes configurable and/or discoverable?

[Cantor, Scott]

> Hi, I'm trying to find out if either the IdP or the SP packages of
> Shibboleth allow you to configure what character is used for a delimiter
> for multiple returned values in an attribute (such as what you see in
> SHIB-EP-SCOPED-AFFILIATION)?

That's an SP issue, nothing to do with the IdP. There are no situations in which an IdP should return multiple values with any sort of delimiter unless the attribute is defined in that peculiar way such that one of its values has internal structure.

> It appears that the default delimiter is a semicolon.

Yes.

> Yesterday I had to change the way our application, DSpace [1],
> handles these multi-value headers (if you're curious [2]), and I heard
> from a DSpace user in the Czech Republic that they also noticed that their
> IdP returned multi-value headers delimited with colons.

Not unless somebody is misusing it, and the SP wouldn't treat them as such, it would be one value to it.

> It would be
> possible to just make this configurable in the application, but I wanted
> to see if perhaps it's a configuration that could be discoverable (so it
> wouldn't require a configuration kludge, and thus any IdP would work with
> any SP, regardless of nationality or language differences). Thanks!

If it depends on the IdP, the IdP is dpeloyed improperly.

The SP delimiter is not configurable, no. It's always a semicolon.

-- Scott