Re: [scim] What if created and lastModified are not populated in the app?

Pierre,

Technically RFC7643 is silent on whether meta attributes are required. It only stipulates format if provided.

Also, RFC7232 (HTTP Conditional Requests) Sec 3.3, 3.4 describes Pre-conditions which count on validators which SCIM (as profile of HTTP) supports but does not require (see etag in RFC7644).

If you simply don’t implement, you are kind of outside the typical implementation approach and some unanticipated effects may result. For example, I would be careful about how search filters or conditional requests are handled involving meta.created/meta.lastmodified.  You may end up returning too many or too few responses to some clients. 

As I mentioned, these fields are used by most clients for change detection.

If you intend your implementation to be generally inter-operable, I would find a way to map a date value that makes sense. E.g. it could be a mapped value based on the last time the underlying database tables were updated (e.g. a batch update).  IOW — every resource you return would have the same “batch” date.

That said, I would expect a lot of implementations to have unexpected results if no meta created or lastmodified dates are returned.  

Hope this helps.

Phillip Hunt
@independentid
phil.hunt@independentid.com

> On Jun 22, 2022, at 8:23 AM, Pierre Ozoux <pierre@ozoux.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi, thanks for your answer!
> 
> 
> 
> Actually are these fields required?
> 
>  - created
> 
>  - lastModified
> 
> 
> Reading rfc7643 it says that:
> 
>       created  The "DateTime" that the resource was added to the service
>          provider.  This attribute MUST be a DateTime.
> 
>       lastModified  The most recent DateTime that the details of this
>          resource were updated at the service provider.  If this
>          resource has never been modified since its initial creation,
>          the value MUST be the same as the value of "created".
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks for your help and have a nice day!
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