Subject: RE: Confusion regarding user interpretations for times spanning m idnight

From: "David Lowndes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:49:03 -0000

> First, I'll start with a general comment:  while I can
appreciate your desire to keep your user interface implementation
simple and straightforward, I don't think this is the right design
overall.  At one end, you're starting with a human user, who is able
to think about times and time intervals very flexibly.  At the other
end, you have the PDP and PEP, which have to turn a policy rule on
and off at the correct times.  There has to be a mapping *somewhere*
between the flexible human representations of times and the concrete
behavior of turning the policy rule on and off.  In general, I think
this "somewhere" should be in the Policy Management Tool.
<

I'd agree with you in principal Bob, but I don't like it!

Every non-standard extension to the schema that vendors have to make just
means that there may as well not be a standard.

> The question of times spanning midnight is a
little more of a gray area.  I can see the requirement for the type
of schedule you're interested in:  start at 22:00 on a set of
specified days, and stop 6 hours later in each case.  It wouldn't be
hard to add something to the schema to indicate whether intervals
spanning midnight are to be interpreted this way, or in the way
they're currently specified in the document.
<

OK, that sounds good to me.

Does anyone else think this is a good/bad idea?

> Even in this case, though, I think the
better place to put the additional code is in the Policy Management
Tools
<

Again, your point is sensible - if it were possible to reconstitute the
original user entry representation from the data in the directory.
Unfortunately, I can't see that you can do that without extending the schema
and adding extra data to work around this limitation - which I hope you'll
agree isn't an elegant solution either.

> remember when the futurists predicted that
by Y2K we'd all be working 30-hour weeks?:-).
<

Yes - shame they got it the wrong way around! We were supposed to have the
difficult problem of how best to spend all our leisure time - chance would
be a fine thing!

>Plus, doing it this
way lets people like you differentiate your Policy Management Tools
from their competitors, by providing more intuitive mappings between
human scheduling concepts and the PDP/PEP-friendly scheduling
representation in the schema.
<
Ah, now you're making it sound like a golden opportunity to shine :)

Dave