History of LDAPCompatibility
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What is LDAP?From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol for accessing on-line directory services.Essentially, LDAP directories are online address books, which corporates often use to centralise their contact information. LDAP has been used to perform other functions such as serving DNS, automount directories, authenticating users and many other roles where centralised information is useful. How does it work?LDAP stores contacts (people, organisations, departments, etc) using a unique identified called a Distinguished Name (DN). A DN could look like this - cn=Stephan Borg,ou=people,o=bitweaver. DN's must be unique within the directory and are used to segregate contact information on a per department, organisation or any kind of grouping level.With each DN, an unlimited number of attributes can be associated. This allows pieces of information to be added to a contact in a flexible manner. These attributes are determined by a read-only schema, which is control through the LDAP server. Some example attributes are:
Talking to LDAPWhen you retrieve information from an LDAP server, you submit the DN and optionally, what attributes you want to retrieve. The output is usually presented in the following format:{CODE()}dn: cn=Stephan Borg,ou=people,o=bitweaver givenName: Stephan mobile: 1234 567 890 sn: Borg uid: wolff_borg cn: Stephan Borg o: Bitweaver mail: me@home.com objectClass: top objectClass: inetOrgPerson objectClass: person objectClass: organizationalPerson objectClass: calEntry calFBURL: http://bitweaver.org/fb/wolff_borg.ifb{CODE} | What is LDAP?From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol for accessing on-line directory services.Essentially, LDAP directories are online address books, which corporates often use to centralise their contact information. LDAP has been used to perform other functions such as serving DNS, automount directories, authenticating users and many other roles where centralised information is useful. How does it work?LDAP stores contacts (people, organisations, departments, etc) using a unique identified called a Distinguished Name (DN). A DN could look like this - cn=Stephan Borg,ou=people,o=bitweaver. DN's must be unique within the directory and are used to segregate contact information on a per department, organisation or any kind of grouping level.With each DN, an unlimited number of attributes can be associated. This allows pieces of information to be added to a contact in a flexible manner. These attributes are determined by a read-only schema, which is controlled through the LDAP server. Some example attributes are:
Talking to LDAPWhen you retrieve information from an LDAP server, you submit the DN and optionally, what attributes you want to retrieve. The output is usually presented in the following format:{CODE()}dn: cn=Stephan Borg,ou=people,o=bitweaver givenName: Stephan mobile: 1234 567 890 sn: Borg uid: wolff_borg cn: Stephan Borg o: Bitweaver mail: me@home.com mail: me@home2.com objectClass: top objectClass: inetOrgPerson objectClass: person objectClass: organizationalPerson objectClass: calEntry calFBURL: http://bitweaver.org/fb/wolff_borg.ifb{CODE} You can see from the output above, that there are two mail attributes. PHP comes with all the functions to talk to and decipher LDAP queries, presenting the information in arrays. One of the goals of the LDAPContactsPackage will be to sub-class LibertyStorage class to communicate with LDAP. |