The sample application maintains objects whose data consists of a simple text string; however, the data type is also defined to contain a standard header. The standard header is a structure defined in dce/database.idl. Mostly it contains fields for a set of UUIDs that identify
· The object itself
· The owner of the object
· The owner's group
· The object's ACL
· The default object ACL
· The default container ACL
The standard header is a convenient means of keeping track of all the object's associated UUIDs, without having to define fields for them in one's own data structure. It is initialized by a call to the dce_db_std_header_init( ) routine.
This is the only database whose data type is explicitly defined in the .idl file, because it's the only database whose data type contains an application-defined field (that is, s_data). The data type is also complex: that is, it contains both a header part and a data part. The other two databases have record types that contain only (simple) data, no headers.