Re: Call for censensus on path forward

>>>>> On Mon, 23 Sep 2002 10:10:09 -0400, Dinakaran Joseph <[email protected]> said:

[Sorry for the delay.]

Dinakaran> A simple logical operations for filtering would be a very
Dinakaran> good thing.

Ok, so you'd like to be able to use more complex expressions like:

(column1 > 100) && ((column2 < 1 || column3 =~ /some.*thing/ ||
                    (column8 == 8 && column9 == 9)))

Right?  Based on your statement, and the fact that Carl Kalbfleisch
and David Perkins submitted allowing similar expressions, I'm going to
take it that this feature is more desired than not.  I'm really
interested in hearing from anyone that opposes this level of
complexity being thrown into the protocol.  As I said at the bottom of
my last draft, I didn't throw this in because I didn't think people
would like it since it would impose even more requirements on the
agent side of things.  Any agent developers want to say something
negative about complex filtering, otherwise it'll go into my next
draft (in an easy to parse way [read: nested BER sequences]).

More questions, assuming people want this:

1) should AND/ORing be MUSTs, SHOULDs or MAY?  (can it be optional to
   implement)

2) should there be a max depth or grouping level allowed to the
   expressions?  IE, can an agent say I won't support the above
   because it's greater than my max depth level of 2 (since the above
   has 3 levels of parens).

-- 
Wes Hardaker
Network Associates Laboratories