Subject: [AAA-WG]: No value strings

From: "Murtaza S. Chiba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 11:58:31 -0700

Hello,
	The current version of the base protocol defines that an attribute may 
have 0 or more data bytes.  Wanted to understand the need for an 
attribute with no value and should it be a new type something other than 
string?  Is an attribute with no data still a string?  Maybe it is 
better to define a new type for no data?

Thanks,
Murtaza

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 23:33:04 +0300

Murtaza S. Chiba wrote:
> Hello,
>     The current version of the base protocol defines that an attribute 
> may have 0 or more data bytes.  Wanted to understand the need for an 

Well, none of the attributes in the base spec make much sense
with zero bytes. (You could perhaps argue that Error-Message might
appear as an empty string.)

Still, I think its right to define the String data type as something
that can even be an empty string. The specific text for the attribute
in question will say more about the contents of the expected string,
often more structure is expected than just a string. Empty values
may make sense in some cases, we don't know all the possible attributes
that folks will define in the future.

--Jari