Summary and Lessons Learned

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 7. Schema Design > Documenting and Publishing Your Schemas

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Documenting and Publishing Your Schemas

There are several reasons why it is important to document all the schemas you use within your directory service. First, you may need the schema information when you add additional servers to your service. You can also share your schema documentation with software vendors and authors of custom applications to aid in design, development, and troubleshooting. Finally, if you create a new, useful schema, you can easily share your design with others and consider promoting it as a standard.

When documenting schemas, you can use any of the three formats described earlier or choose your own format. The best approach is to match as closely as possible the format used by your directory service implementation. If you haven't made that decision yet, just pick a format you are comfortable with. You should also add the attribute types and object classes to the data elements list you created during the data design process (see Chapter 6).

We recommend that you publish your directory schema definitions at least within your own organization. Schema information is useful to users of the directory and developers of directory-enabled applications. If you want other organizations and independent software vendors to adopt your schemas, you should publish them on an external Web site or in another appropriate place where everyone will have access to them.

Finally, if you plan to promote some schema elements that you designed for consideration as a standard, you should publish them using the process defined by the standards body. For the IETF, which handles most Internet standards (including LDAP), this means writing an Internet Draft and submitting it to the IETF secretariat for publication. Connect to the IETF World Wide Web site at http://www.ietf.org for more information on how to contribute.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services,  2002 New Riders Publishing
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Index terms contained in this section

directories
         schemas
                    documenting 2nd 3rd
documents
          schemas 2nd 3rd
IETF
          Web site
publishing
          schemas 2nd 3rd
schemas
          documenting 2nd 3rd
Web sites
          IETF

2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672323168
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 245

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