Understanding the cause of error related to parsing Issuer

[Scott Cantor]

> On Jan 21, 2026, at 7:01 PM, david.jones at equorum.com wrote:
> 
> I anonymized the server name here, but text search matches the strings exactly in each occurrence.  Could the change in the Format attribute make a difference?

An Issuer (or a NameID, which Issuer is a subtype of) consists of a value, and a number of optional attributes with various defaults. A match requires equality across all of them, which is spelled out in the standard.

The Issuer element's default Format is as designated in the standard and is the one in the Response, and the value in that sample from the Assertion level is complete nonsense. But nonsense or not, they don't match.

And the profile requires that the Issuer's Format be the one in the Response or absent, to begin with. Accepting any other Format is a bug even aside from the mismatch.

-- Scott