Issue 8694: versioning issue with CORBA reflection (corba-reflection-ftf) Source: Progress Software (Mr. Steve Vinoski, steve.vinoski@iona.com vinoski@iona.com) Nature: Uncategorized Issue Severity: Summary: A few months ago, Bob Kukura mentioned to me in person that there's a versioning issue with CORBA reflection. Specifically, the spec as written does not allow for easy interoperation between callers and targets that support different CORBA versions. For example, a CORBA 2.x client would not understand an ExtFullInterfaceDescription returned from a reflection call on a CORBA 3.x server. To fix this, I propose adding a typeid (string) argument to the reflection retrieval operations. Only the typeid values for FullInterfaceDescription and ExtFullInterfaceDescription are allowed; other values result in a FormatNotSupported exception. A CORBA 2.x server that does not support the ExtFullInterfaceDescription type (few likely will) may also raise a FormatNotSupported exception if it receives a request with a ExtFullInterfaceDescription typeid argument. We could also consider allowing the InterfaceDescription typeid back from the CORBA 1.x days, but I would think that so few applications could actually make any real use of it that requiring support for it would just mean added unnecessary overhead. Resolution: Revised Text: Resolution: Add a typeid string to the metadata retrieval operations to allow clients to specify the exact version of reflection metadata they want. Revised Text: See accompanying convenience documents ptc/2005-05-04 (amended CORBA Reflection RFC with changebars and strikethroughs noting all changes from the original version) and ptc/2005-05-05 (revised IDL). Actions taken: November 1, 2005: closed issue Discussion: End of Annotations:===== ubject: CORBA reflection issue Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 00:58:12 -0400 X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: CORBA reflection issue Thread-Index: AcU+UxAFYsdtUunFTya+QED/h4bmKg== From: "Vinoski, Stephen" To: X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by amethyst.omg.org id j3B4xUhh002101 A few months ago, Bob Kukura mentioned to me in person that there's a versioning issue with CORBA reflection. Specifically, the spec as written does not allow for easy interoperation between callers and targets that support different CORBA versions. For example, a CORBA 2.x client would not understand an ExtFullInterfaceDescription returned from a reflection call on a CORBA 3.x server. To fix this, I propose adding a typeid (string) argument to the reflection retrieval operations. Only the typeid values for FullInterfaceDescription and ExtFullInterfaceDescription are allowed; other values result in a FormatNotSupported exception. A CORBA 2.x server that does not support the ExtFullInterfaceDescription type (few likely will) may also raise a FormatNotSupported exception if it receives a request with a ExtFullInterfaceDescription typeid argument. We could also consider allowing the InterfaceDescription typeid back from the CORBA 1.x days, but I would think that so few applications could actually make any real use of it that requiring support for it would just mean added unnecessary overhead. --steve