Hi Erik,
The impression I am getting is that the intent of the spec is that
any of these 4 elements can occur any number of times (0->n),
and the fact that meaningless Policies (i.e. Policies w no Rules)
can be created is not a concern, because they can be used as
placeholders for certain implementation strategies.
where the term "meaningless" refers to the fact that
such Policies play no role in the decision process,
and their presence may be ignored by a PDP.
Also, the fact that 2 of them have minOccurs="0" and
the other 2 have default minOccurs="1" is a pointless
distinction, because the fact that any element has
minOccurs="0" implicitly overrides the minOccurs of
any other element within the choice group.
It would seem to me that at a minimum, we could include
an advisory note to developers that a PDP may ignore
a Policy that contains no Rules, since there is no point
from a XACML functional perspective to provide any logic
to do anything specific with such Policies.
Such an approach would remove any questions from developers,
and could leave the schema unchanged.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Rich
On 1/30/2012 5:25 PM, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,
Actually, I think I was mistaken in my email. If the schema is
like it is:
<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element ref="xacml:CombinerParameters"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:RuleCombinerParameters"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:VariableDefinition"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:Rule"/>
</xs:choice>
Then a completely empty policy is possibly since you can make a
choice of a "non-existing parameter". So there really is no issue
here. Agreed, the schema could be a bit prettier, but it works.
Best regards,
Erik
On 2012-01-30 10:14, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,
I think the intent has always been to allow empty policies. It's
useful especially for automatically generated policies to be
able to generate empty policies as a special case of a general
scheme for generating a full policy set.
So I would not want to restrict the schema like your first
bullet point. Rather the change to do would be to add a
minOccurs="0" to the choice, but since it is already possible to
generate a policy with no rules in the current schema (by
putting a a dummy combiner parameter), I don't think it's a big
deal.
Best regards,
Erik
On 2012-01-29 19:15, rich levinson wrote:
Hi Erik,
At this point we are simply trying to determine what the
schema should be,
in the sense that if it was reflecting the intended behavior,
what changes
would be appropriate.
For example it would seem the appropriate changes might be:
A Policy must have one or more Rules.
A Policy may have zero or more VariableDefinitions
A Policy may have zero or one CombinerParameters
A Policy may have zero or one RuleCombinerParameters
If these are the actual requirements that are intended, or if
some
other specific requirements are more accurate or appropriate,
then
the purpose of the issue being raised is to determine what are
the
correct requirements.
Once the requirements are established, then we can evaluate
what,
if any, impact that might have on the schema, and whether the
TC thinks the schema should be changed.
At present, it appears that the current schema does not
reflect
any kind of plausible real requirements, and this represents
a problem for developers using the specification to build
products,
because they may be uncertain how to handle the use cases that
are made possible w the current schema.
Thanks,
Rich
On 1/27/2012 6:10 PM, Erik Rissanen wrote:
Hi Rich,
I don't think there is anything which needs to be changed
here. It's true that the schema is a bit weird in this
respect. It's a carry over from 2.0, and does not represent
any practical concern.
Empty policies are fine I think, though it does not really
make sense to have an empty policy with variables since
there would be no rule to use them.
But there is not really any issue in how to interpret any
combination which the schema allows and there is no reason
for a product to produce meaningless policies.
I would say that we keep it as it is.
Best regards,
Erik
On 2012-01-24 07:23, rich levinson wrote:
To TC:
We have been looking at the xsd for Policy and there is a
central
"choice" element that does not appear correct, although
for
mainstream Policies it probably does not show up.
The choice element is the following:
2028
<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element ref="xacml:CombinerParameters"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:RuleCombinerParameters"
minOccurs="0"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:VariableDefinition"/>
<xs:element ref="xacml:Rule"/>
</xs:choice>
This is the construct that allows multiple Rules in a
Policy, which, looking at
the Rule element alone, seems ok, as default is
minOccurs="1", and it
inherits maxOccurs="unbounded" from the choice element
itself.
However, very little else about this element appears to
make sense:
Since this is a choice element, w minOccurs="1", one
could choose any
of the other 3 elements and nothing else, and the
result would be a
Policy with zero Rules. Does this make sense?
With zero Rules, even if you used the Policy to
define VariableDefinitions,
they cannot be referenced outside the Policy, and
since there are no
Rules in the Policy, there is nothing that would ever
use the
VariableDefinitions.
Does it make sense to have multiple instances of
either CombinerParameters
or RuleCombinerParameters? i.e. can't all the
parameters be put in one
element in both cases? If not then why are these
elements in the choice
block that allows unbounded instances?
Please advise as to whether the above interpretation is
accurate. If so, we would
like to consider raising this as an issue for action.
Thanks,
Rich
