[netconf] subtree filter any namespace

[Christian Hopps <[e-mail]>]

I've been adding subtree to xpath conversion to my netconf python client/server code (with some help from others), and in trying to get the "any" namespace stuff working I ran into an issue.

The client code was setting the default namespace to 'xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0"' on the top XML rpc message element. This had an unwanted side-effect of placing everything in a sub-tree filter then into the netconf namespace (if none were given). As a work-around I created the filter element with a blank default namespace; however, I'm not sure this is correct, i.e.,

<get>
 <filter xmlns=''>
 ... users specified filter ...
 </filter>
</get>

The correct thing is probably to not set the default namespace in the client code; however, I'm not sure I can do this now for backward compatible reasons. I could do it perhaps if the user specified a filter, but I'm curious if it's valid to just set it to blank. Googling produced conflicting answers for me.

Thanks,
Chris.