Programming Jabber

Registration instructions

Registration instructions such as those defined here:

<register notify="yes">
  <instructions>Choose a userid and password to register.</instructions>
  <name/>
  <email/>
</register>

are available to whoever asks for them; in its most formal state, the procedure for creating a new user account on a Jabber server (specifically, in the JSM) includes a first step of asking the server what is required for the registration process.

The registration service is provided by the mod_register module.

In reply to such a request (which is made with an IQ-get request in the jabber:iq:register namespace—see Section 6.2.11 and Section 7.2 for details) the instructions and a list of required fields are returned by mod_register. Note that the list of fields provided in this <register/> section are over and above the standard fields in any case for registration:

• <username/>

• <password/>

so that in this particular configuration case both <name/> and <email/>, and <username/> and <password/> will be sent in the reply. The text inside the <instructions/> tag, also sent, is intended for display by the client if it supports such a dynamic process. Typically the client would request the registration requirements and build a screen asking the user to enter values for the required fields, while displaying the instructions received.

The notify="yes" attribute of the <register/> tag will cause a message to be automatically created and sent to the server administrator address(es) ...