Understanding Attribute Syntaxes

Attribute syntaxes are essentially data type definitions. The syntax for an attribute type indicates the type of data meant to be held by the corresponding values. This can be used to determine whether a particular value is acceptable for a given attribute, as well as to provide information about how the directory server should interact with existing values.

The directory server supports the ability to reject values that violate the associated attribute syntax, and this is the default behavior for the purposes of standards compliance. It is possible to disable this attribute syntax checking completely if necessary, but it is also possible to accept values that violate the associated syntax but log a warning message to the directory server's error log every time this occurs. However, if attributes are allowed to have values that violate their associated syntax, matching operations might not behave as expected with such values. For information about disabling schema checking, see Configuring Schema Checking in Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2 Administration Guide.

The following sections discuss attribute syntax:

• The Attribute Syntax Description Format

• Commonly Used Attribute Syntaxes

• The Pattern-Matching Syntax Extension

• The Enumeration Syntax Extension

• Substitution Syntax Extension