Description Oliver Friedrich 2025-08-05 14:01:00 CEST

During the development of customer-specific extensions for UCS, we came across some UDM properties, whose logic is twisted from our pov:


>property_descriptions.dontsearch: bool
>    If set to False, the property is not searchable.

From:
https://docs.software-univention.de/developer-reference/5.2/en/udm/udm-modules.html#udm_modules_globals.property_descriptions.dontsearch

This should have been named "search" or the logic should be reversed.

and:

> copyable (optional)
>   Copy the value of the property when the entry is cloned.

From:
https://docs.software-univention.de/developer-reference/5.2/en/udm/package-extended-attributes.html#package-extended-attributes

Although it's not written there explicitly, we know that this also has a reversed logic: If copyable is set to true, then this means that the extended attribute can NOT be copied!

All in all, this is very confusing and should be changed to the expected behaviour. I know that this might break some of our integrations, that's why I have the following proposal:

Add a linked attribute, such that it is dependent of the "wrong" attribute, but make this "right".

For example: add an attribute to UDM modules, which is called search and copies the logic from dontsearch. If dontsearch is set to False, then search should be set to False, too. So it is a kind of "translation". Both values are "linked", which means you can, for a period of time, use both values at the same place, so that you don't break existing implementations. If one attribute is changed, the link one changes to the same value, too and vice versa.
In the future, dontsearch can be removed while search is kept, with the same values.

The same should be applied to copyable (e.g. name it non-copyable to keep the logic) and maybe more attributes I'm not aware of...