Network Working Group H. Alvestrand Request for Comments: 2161 UNINETT Category: Experimental January 1998
A MIME Body Part for ODA
Status of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
Status of this Memo ........................................ 1 1 Introduction .............................................. 1 1.1 The Application/ODA MIME content-type ................... 1 1.2 ODA - application/oda ................................... 2 2 Security Considerations ................................... 3 3 References ................................................ 4 4 Author's Address .......................................... 4 5 Full Copyright Statement .................................. 5
This document contains the definitions, originally contained in RFC 1495 and RFC 1341, on how to carry ODA in MIME, and how to translate it to its X.400 representation.
The "ODA" subtype of application is used to indicate that a body contains information encoded according to the Office Document Architecture [ODA] standards, using the ODIF representation format. For application/oda, the Content-Type line should also specify an attribute/value pair that indicates the document application profile (DAP), using the key word "profile", and the document class, using the keyword "class".
For the keyword "class", the values "formatted", "processable" and "formatted-processable" are legal values.
Alvestrand Experimental [Page 1]
RFC 2161 A MIME Body Part for ODA January 1998
Thus an appropriate header field might look like this:
The body of the MIME content-type is the Data part of the ODA body part.
When mapping from MIME to X.400, the following steps are done:
The Parameters.document-application-profile and Parameters.document- architecture-class are set from the tables above. If any of the parameters are missing, the values for Q112 and formatted-processable are used.
It is an option for the gateway implementor to try to access them from inside the document, where they are defined as
Gateways are NOT required to do this, since the document- characteristics are optional parameters. If a gateway does not, it simply uses the defaulting rules defined above.
The OBJECT IDENTIFIERs for the document application profile and for ODA {2 8 0 0} must be added to the Encoded Information Types parameter of the message envelope.
ODA body parts have the natural propensity of complex structures that it is hard to find out what the parts are capable of.
Moreover, ODA is an extensible architecture, where new content portions may be added at any time, so that the threats posed by this body part may change over time.
However, no security risks related to ODA are known at this time.
[MIME] Freed, N., and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 2045, November 1996.
[T.411] CCITT Recommendation T.411 (1988), Open Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format, Introduction and General Principles.
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
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