The Publisher channel of the SOAP driver has certain limitations that allow it to listen only for Change events. It has no way to query for additional information or to poll the HTTP/SOAP source. Therefore, Modify events received on the Publisher channel for unassociated objects (or an object that was not created by the same instance of the driver) almost always fail (return an error). The reason for this is that the driver and the Metadirectory engine cannot successfully change an unassociated Modify event into an Add command without the ability to send a query to the HTTP/SOAP source. Because the SOAP driver has no mechanism to query back to the source, it returns an error stating that query is not implemented.
There is no general solution for this limitation. Therefore, a sample configuration for DSML and SPML returns an error when this condition occurs. If, in a specific driver deployment, it becomes necessary to apply an association on an object, and the possibility of inconsistent information in that newly associated object is acceptable, this can be achieved in policy by setting the Destination DN in the Modify event and creating your own set-association event. This allows the modification to occur on the existing object, even when not previously associated.