Mailing-List: contact api-help@directory.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: api@directory.apache.org
Received-SPF: pass (athena.apache.org: domain of elecharny@gmail.com
 designates 74.125.82.178 as permitted sender)
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
        d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
        h=message-id:date:from:reply-to:user-agent:mime-version:to:subject
         :content-type:content-transfer-encoding;
        b=iyQf500J4mD3Yl14mAgg5OrciOPfSUw4Ux/AjgZQ5NGw1Cxtd4LLETCYAyj/muOwwP
         b7mVrBTi89vYbtJ/qzXefgwOg9nQCvr7FoqGUqIMpsVVJFhDm8hLteq+ayUdsIz55L7Y
         FAZsS7pUx6oYiM2e8dno044E4VeKwCZAUrSg8=
Message-ID: <4BD6B5D4.9010203@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:00:52 +0200
From: Emmanuel Lecharny <elecharny@gmail.com>
Reply-To: elecharny@apache.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;
 rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: api@directory.apache.org
Subject: Entry and Attribute comparisons
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Hi,

just wondering how deep we should go when implementing the equals() and 
hashcode() methods :
- for an entry, is it enough to check that the DN is equal ? Otherwise, 
we will have to sort all the attributes (based on their OID, I guess), 
then for each Attribute, sort all of their value (using the normalized 
value of course, which means the Attribute is schema aware)...
- for an Attribute, as stated above, we will have somehow to sort the 
normalized values, using the specific syntax for the Attribute, 
otherwise we might not be able to compare two Attributes.

I would rather go for a simpler version of hashcode() and equals() where 
we only compare DN for entries and the attribute ID for Attribute. The 
rational is that we usually never compare entries (or we use a dedicated 
method for that : compare()), and we only need to check if an Attribute 
is stored into an Entry (speaking about the hashcode method). For the 
Attribute equals method, this is slightly different. I'm not sure we 
should compare all the values, but right now, I see no other way to do it...

Thoughts ?

-- 
Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel L�charny
www.nextury.com