Re: merge/replace selection criteria

[Phil Shafer <phil@juniper.net>]

Paul Sangree writes:
>However, how does the target system know whether we are trying to change 
>Bill's address to "123 A Street" or change John's name to "Bill 
>Baker"?  Both interpretations are valid but only one yields the desired result.

Another valid-but-wrong interpretation would be replacing all
users. The interpretation depends on the understanding of
identifiers (identifying elements), but how should this be
expressed inside the protocol? Or does it need to be, given
that code handling users will either know what the identifiers
are or learn them from the schema file?

FWIW, early on, Junoscript had an attribute that indicated that an
element was an identifier.  Developers generally found it somehow
confusing and we whacked it.

Thanks,
 Phil

--
to unsubscribe send a message to netconf-request@ops.ietf.org with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/netconf/>