A single-valued attribute that represents the
user-friendly identifier
of an object on a target resource.
For instance, the name of an
Account
will most often be its loginName.
The value of
Name
need not be unique within
ObjectClass
.
In LDAP, for example, the
Name
could be the
Common Name (CN)
.
Contrast this with
Uid
, which is intended to be a unique identifier
(and, if possible, immutable):
- When an application creates an object, the application uses the
Name
attribute to supply the user-friendly identifier for the object.
(Because the create operation returns the Uid
as its result,
the application cannot know the Uid
value beforehand.)
- When an application renames an object, this changes the
Name
of the object.
(For some target resources that do not have a separate internal identifier,
this might also change the Uid
.
However, the application would never attempt to change the Uid
directly.)
NOTE: For some connectors,
Name
and
Uid
will be equivalent.
If a target resource does not support a separate, internal identifier
for an object, then the create() method can simply return a
Uid
that has the same string value as the
Name
attribute.
The DatabaseTable connector is an example of a connector
that might use the same value for both
Name
and
Uid
.