The primary service provided by a federated naming system is to map a composite name to a reference. A composite name is composed of name components from one or more naming systems. A reference consists of one or more communication end points. An additional service provided by a federated naming system is to provide access to attributes associated with named objects. This extension is to satisfy most applications' additional naming service needs without cluttering the basic naming service model. XFN is a programming interface for a federated naming service.

To use the XFN interface, include the xfn/xfn.h header file and link the application with -lxfn.

The xfn/xfn.h header file contains the interface declarations for:

• the XFN base context interface,
• the XFN base attribute interface,
• status object and status codes used by operations in these two interfaces,
• abstract data types passed as parameters to and returned as values from operations in these two interfaces, and
• the interface for the XFN standard syntax model for parsing compound names.

/usr/include/xfn/xfn.h

FN_ctx_t(3XFN), FN_status_t(3XFN), xfn_attributes(3XFN), xfn_composite_names(3XFN), xfn_compound_names(3XFN), xfn_status_codes(3XFN), fns(5), fns_policies(5)

The implementation of XFN in this Solaris release is based on the X/Open preliminary specification. It is likely that there will be minor changes to these interfaces to reflect changes in the final version of this specification. The next minor release of Solaris will offer binary compatibility for applications developed using the current interfaces. As the interfaces evolve toward standardization, it is possible that future releases of Solaris will require minor source code changes to applications that have been developed against the preliminary specification.