Issue 2971:  Reflective IDL fix for CORBA 2.3 (mof-rtf)
Source: DSTC (Dr. Stephen Crawley, nobody)
Nature: Uncategorized Issue
Severity: 
Summary: The Reflective module contains the following IDL type alias:

  typedef any ValueType;

Unfortunately, CORBA 2.3 has added a new IDL keyword "valuetype".  Hence a
CORBA 2.3 compliant compiler will give syntax errors for the Reflective IDL.

Possible solutions include:

  1)  Replace "ValueType" with "_ValueType" throughout the 
      Reflective module.  

  2)  Change "ValueType" to another name; e.g. "CorbaValueType".

  3)  Remove the typedef, and replace all instances with "any".

Resolution: Adopt approach 1 to minimize impact on interoperability.  Flag this to be fixed properly in MOF 2.0.
Revised Text: Change all occurrences of "ValueType" in IDL to "_ValueType". 
Change all occurrences of "ValueType" in text to "Reflective::ValueType" 

Sections 5.4, 6.2.1, 6.2.3, 6.3.2, Appendix B.2 


Actions taken:
October 14, 1999: received issue
December 3, 2001: closed issue
Discussion: 

End of Annotations:=====
X-Mailer: exmh version 2.1.0 09/18/1999
To: issues@omg.org, mof-rtf@omg.org
Subject: Reflective IDL fix for CORBA 2.3
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 12:03:21 +1000
From: Stephen Crawley <crawley@dstc.edu.au>
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The Reflective module contains the following IDL type alias:

  typedef any ValueType;

Unfortunately, CORBA 2.3 has added a new IDL keyword "valuetype".
Hence a
CORBA 2.3 compliant compiler will give syntax errors for the
Reflective IDL.

Possible solutions include:

  1)  Replace "ValueType" with "_ValueType" throughout the 
      Reflective module.  

  2)  Change "ValueType" to another name; e.g. "CorbaValueType".

  3)  Remove the typedef, and replace all instances with "any".

Solution 1) has no impact on pre- MOF 1.4 clients and servers.
However, it makes use of another feature of CORBA 2.3, and means 
that MOF vendors would need to supply different Reflective.idl 
files for CORBA 2.3 and pre CORBA 2.3 implementations of MOF.  
[I don't think this should create any ORB version related 
interoperability problems for MOFs, since the IDL types / TypeCodes 
would be the same in both cases.]

Solutions 2) and 3) change the MOF interfaces and could cause
minor interoperability problems between MOF 1.3 and MOF 1.4.

-- Steve


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To: mof-rtf@omg.org
Subject: Proposed resolution for Issue 2971
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Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 15:17:41 +1000
From: Stephen Crawley <crawley@dstc.edu.au>
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> Title: Issue 2971: Reflective IDL fix for CORBA 2.3
> Summary: The Reflective module contains the following IDL type
> alias: 
> 
>   typedef any ValueType; 
> 
> Unfortunately, CORBA 2.3 has added a new IDL keyword
> "valuetype". Hence a 
> CORBA 2.3 compliant compiler will give syntax errors for the
> Reflective IDL.
>  
> Possible solutions include: 
> 1) Replace "ValueType" with "_ValueType" throughout the Reflective
> module.
> 2) Change "ValueType" to another name; e.g. "CorbaValueType". 
> 3) Remove the typedef, and replace all instances with "any".

Proposed resolution:

Adopt approach 1 to minimize impact on interoperability.  Flag this to
be 
fixed properly in MOF 2.0.

Proposed revised text:

Change all occurrences of "ValueType" in IDL to "_ValueType".  
Change all occurrences of "ValueType" in text to
"Reflective::ValueType"

Sections 5.4, 6.2.1, 6.2.3, 6.3.2, Appendix B.2

Add the following sentence to the second paragraph of 6.3.2:

"Note: the ValueType typedef in CORBA IDL is written with a leading
"_" 
escape to avoid collision with the CORBA 2.3 valuetype keyword.  (The
name 
of this type will be changed in a future revision of this
specification.)"

[Editorial:]

Change the last sentence of the second paragraph of 6.3.2 to 
say "... is meta-model specific according to the patterns 
defined in 6.2.1.  Add the ValueType typedef to the IDL for the 
MofError exception in 5.4.