RFLEC — versioning issue with CORBA reflection

A few months ago, Bob Kukura mentioned to me in person that there's a versioning issue with CORBA reflection. Specifically, the spec as written does not allow for easy interoperation between callers and targets that support different CORBA versions. For example, a CORBA 2.x client would not understand an ExtFullInterfaceDescription returned from a reflection call on a CORBA 3.x server.

To fix this, I propose adding a typeid (string) argument to the reflection retrieval operations. Only the typeid values for FullInterfaceDescription and ExtFullInterfaceDescription are allowed; other values result in a FormatNotSupported exception. A CORBA 2.x server that does not support the ExtFullInterfaceDescription type (few likely will) may also raise a FormatNotSupported exception if it receives a request with a ExtFullInterfaceDescription typeid argument.

We could also consider allowing the InterfaceDescription typeid back from the CORBA 1.x days, but I would think that so few applications could actually make any real use of it that requiring support for it would just mean added unnecessary overhead.

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