template attribute definition possible bug?

[Cantor, Scott]

On 11/2/15, 1:06 PM, "Cantor, Scott" <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:



>On 11/2/15, 1:05 PM, "users on behalf of Athanasios Douitsis" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of aduitsis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>To clarify my question, I'd like to know whether there is any way to access the value of one or more mapped connectors from a template connector. Possible?
>
>These aren't connectors, they're attribute definitions. Very different things.

Also, any plugin can access the product of any other plugin. The type of the dependency doesn't really enter into it, the other plugin is only consuming the results produced by the dependency, regardless of how they were produced. Other than the types of values involved in some cases, not much else matters.

A data connector produces a sort of table result set of multiple attributes with a common number of values across the result set. And they have no encoders so have no wire representation.

An attribute definition always produces a single attribute as output that may or may not have encoders.

So that's the basic difference. From a dependency standpoint, things can get very odd when you mix dependencies of connectors and attributes, particularly if they share common attribute IDs across the plugins.

And a <Dependency> ID is never explicitly an attribute ID, unless they're deliberately overlapped. That's why plugins have "sourceId" properties or elements, to specify what actual input attribute to pull from a dependency.

-- Scott