Re: Date/Birthday fields and LDAP schemas

Mark Banner wrote:
> I had a look around at the various LDAP schemas a while back and 
> couldn't find any date/birthday format already defined.

There are several with different syntaxes used. So it's still a common 
problem. :-/

> Although having 
> just thought about it again, I guess the modifytimestamp is a date field.

First one should avoid using the LDAP syntax GeneralizedTime (e.g. used 
for modifytimestamp) for an attribute storing date of birth since in 
most cases the date of birth is only known without a time (and time 
zone) and therefore a correct equality matching would not be feasible.
This directly rules out the definition of attribute type dateOfBirth in 
RFC 2985.

> Even so, does anyone know of existing schemas that define a birthday 
> field and/or date format? I'd like to see if we can use something that 
> already exists rather than define our own.

Personally I'm using a custom attribute type in my own OID arc with 
YYYY-MM-DD as defined in ISO 8601 (based on LDAP syntax IA5String).

Others (e.g. SCHAC) are using a syntax like YYYYMMDD (based on LDAP 
syntax NumericString).

Ciao, Michael.