Shibboleth Developers

SimpleAttributeDefinition does not maintain order of attribute values for
multi-valued attributes, even if the dependencies resolve to ordered
attribute values.

Although data sources such as LDAP do not maintain order of different values
for a multi-valued attribute, for other repositories, the order of the
values may be important.

For instance, the order of rows returned by a JDBC query may be relevant to
an application. Similarly, queries written against a proprietary data
repository may also returned ordered values for multi-valued attributes.

I don't believe that SAML Attribute values are ordered either, which in a
way justifies not maintaining the order. However, it prevents writing
CustomDataConnectors or CustomAttributeDefinitions that may rely on the
attribute value order.

It turns out that a simple fix in the SimpleAttributeDefinition can maintain
original order of attribute values. If the usage of "HashSet" is replaced
with a "LinkedHashSet", the order of values can be maintained without much
significant overhead.

Any thoughts?

--
Vishal Goenka
SunGard SCT
Advisory Technical Architect, Luminis Solutions
+91 80 511 42767 (Office)
+91 98455 46487 (Mobile)
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