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.