Searching & Comparing Directory Data

About Searching An LDAP search looks up entries based on the following parameters. A filter that indicates which attribute values to match A base DN that specifies where in the directory information tree to look for matches A scope that defines how far to go under the base DN A list of attributes to fetch for an entry when a match is found For example, imagine you must write an application where users login using their email address and a password. After the user logs in, your application displays the user's full name so it is obvious who is logged in. Your application is supposed to go to the user directory both for authentication, and also to read user profile information. You are told the user directory stores user profile entries under base DN ou=People,dc=example,dc=com, that email addresses are stored on the standard mail attribute, and full names are store on the standard cn attribute. You figure out how to authenticate from the chapter on authentication, in which you learn you need a bind DN and a password to do simple authentication. But how do you find the bind DN given the email? How do you get the full name? The answer to both questions is that you do an LDAP search for the user's entry, which has the DN that you use to bind, and you have the server fetch the cn attribute in the results. Your search uses the following parameters. The filter is (mail=emailAddress), where emailAddress is the email address the user provided. The base DN is the one given to you, ou=People,dc=example,dc=com. For the scope, you figure the user entry is somewhere under the base DN, so you opt to search the whole subtree. The attribute to fetch is cn. TODO: Explain how to do this, either with code from http://opendj.forgerock.org/opendj-ldap-sdk-examples/xref/org/forgerock/opendj/examples/search/Main.html or writing some more directly relevant sample code. The other sections in this chapter can expand more on filters, building search requests, iterating through results, potentially abandoning, but this section should stay focused on the basic example to make the idea clear.