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[Bryce S.]

Hi,

Can anyone point me to the best way to connect a genero application to an LDAP database - in this case Windows Active Directory (just wanting to check existence of user names).
I searched the documentation and forums but find no mention of LDAP - is it even possible?  Or is it something like find an odbc driver that will connect to ldap and use that, if they exist.

Regards,
  Bryce Stenberg
  IT Department
  Harness Racing New Zealand Inc.

[Sebastien F.]

Hello Bryce,

Genero BDL does not have a build-in API or ODI driver to access LDAP databases, let me explain why:

There are many different LDAP clients/servers, and we cannot support all them:
1) OpenLDAP
2) Oracle Internet Directory
3) Microsoft Active Directory
See this page for a complete list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LDAP_software

A few years ago I started to write such a driver, but even for a given LDAP client (was OpenLDAP), I had to build 2 different drivers, with and without SSL...
So you can understand that LDAP is too specific to be provided as standard feature of Genero BDL.

If you just need to get some user information, my suggestion is to take your preferred LDAP client (Wldap32.dll), and write a little C extension on the top of the native API... Another option could be to use Java LDAP, if you are using BDL 2.20+, but keep in mind that this will load a JVM instance, which can be some overhead if it's just for one LDAP call...

I am not an expert, but an important topic is how you will identify the current user querying the LDAP server...
Maybe I ask you why you need to get user information?
Is it to get address / phone etc or to get passwords to connect to an SQL database?

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_Protocol
http://technet.microsoft.com => search LDAP

Hope this helps,
Seb

[Bryce S.]

Maybe I ask you why you need to get user information?
Is it to get address / phone etc or to get passwords to connect to an SQL database?

Hi Seb,

We want to add 'internet' users to our informix database so they can have access to a couple of applications - these users will be adding themselves after entering some private info we already know so we can verify their identity. But first we want to check that their chosen username does not conflict with any existing usernames - which includes checking in Active Directory for our domain users names - hence need to for LDAP connection or some method to dynamically get the users from Active Directory

I didn't realize querying a LDAP server was so complicated - I thought it was just a protocol that lots of poeple would have written drivers for, you assemble your connect string and send it, then send your query string and get a reply... I guess it is that 'driver' bit that is hard. We may try the Java way, or, I see a number of simple examples using VB script - maybe easiest road will be to make one work via a 'fgl_system' call.

Thanks,
 Bryce.

[Tim B.]

I've implemented LDAP here by using web services to connect to PHP, which has LDAP libraries.  We use it to authenicate users and bring through various attributes from AD.  Works very well.