[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH 0236] ipaldap: Fallback to string if datetime conversion went wrong

[Petr Viktorin]

On 06/26/2014 08:30 AM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
> On 25.6.2014 18:25, Petr Viktorin wrote:
>> On 06/25/2014 05:29 PM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On 25.6.2014 17:17, Tomas Babej wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Our datetime conversion does not support full LDAP Generalized
>>>> time syntax. In the unsupported cases, we should fall back
>>>> to string representation of the attribute.
>>>>
>>>> In particular, '0' is used to denote no value of LDAP generalized
>>>> time attribute.
>>>>
>>>> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/4350
>>>
>>> NACK, this beats the purpose of decoding of the values, because it
>>> requires you to check the type of the value before using it.
>>>
>>> Instead, you should either fix the code that uses the
>>> nsds5ReplicaLastUpdate{Start,End} attributes to access their raw value
>>> directly, or exclude the attributes from decoding to datetime by
>>> overriding their type in IPASimpleLDAPObject._SYNTAX_OVERRIDE.
>>>
>>> Honza
>>>
>>
>> I agree that just returning a string when conversion fails is the wrong
>> thing to do.
>>
>> I think that if LDAP generalized can contain the empty/invalid value, we
>> should convert the '0' to what Python uses for that -- None.
>>
>
> But None already means "empty attribute".

I don't think you can get [None] currently, can you? None is the default 
default for get(), but I don't think that's a problem.

-- 
Petr³