Entry(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Entry(3)NAME
Mozilla::LDAP::Entry.pm - Object class to hold one LDAP entry.
SYNOPSIS
use Mozilla::LDAP::Conn;
use Mozilla::LDAP::Entry;
ABSTRACT
The LDAP::Conn object is used to perform LDAP searches, updates, adds
and deletes. All such functions works on LDAP::Entry objects only. All
modifications and additions you'll do to an LDAP entry, will be done
through this object class.
DESCRIPTION
The LDAP::Entry object class is built on top of the Tie::Hash standard
object class. This gives us several powerful features, the main one
being to keep track of what is changing in the LDAP entry. This makes
it very easy to write LDAP clients that needs to update/modify entries,
since you'll just do the changes, and this object class will take care
of the rest.
We define local functions for STORE, FETCH, DELETE, EXISTS, FIRSTKEY
and NEXTKEY in this object class, and inherit the rest from the super
class. Overloading these specific functions is how we can keep track of
what is changing in the entry, which turns out to be very convenient.
We can also easily "loop" over the attribute types, ignoring internal
data, or deleted attributes.
Most of the methods here either return the requested LDAP value, or a
status code. The status code (either 0 or 1) indicates the failure or
success of a certain operation. 0 (False) meaning the operation failed,
and a return code of 1 (True) means complete success.
One thing to remember is that in LDAP, attribute names are case
insensitive. All methods in this class are aware of this, and will
convert all attribute name arguments to lower case before performing
any operations. This does not mean that the values are case
insensitive. On the contrary, all values are considered case sensitive
by this module, even if the LDAP server itself treats it as a CIS
attribute.
OBJECT CLASS METHODS
The LDAP::Entry class implements many methods you can use to access and
modify LDAP entries. It is strongly recommended that you use this API
as much as possible, and avoid using the internals of the class
directly. Failing to do so may actually break the functionality.
Creating a new entry
To create a completely new entry, use the new method, for instance
$entry = Mozilla::LDAP::Entry->new()
$entry->setDN("uid=leif,ou=people,dc=netscape,dc=com");
$entry->{objectclass} = [ "top", "person", "inetOrgPerson" ];
$entry->addValue("cn", "Leif Hedstrom");
$entry->addValue("sn", "Hedstrom");
$entry->addValue("givenName", "Leif");
$entry->addValue("mail", "leif@netscape.com);
$conn->add($entry);
This is the minimum requirements for an LDAP entry. It must have a DN,
and it must have at least one objectclass. As it turns out, by adding
the person and inetOrgPerson classes, we also must provide some more
attributes, like CN and SN. This is because the object classes have
these attributes marked as "required", and we'd get a schema violation
without those values.
In the example above we use both native API methods to add values, and
setting an attribute entire value set directly. Note that the value set
is a pointer to an array, and not the array itself. In the example
above, the object classes are set using an anonymous array, which the
API handles properly. It's important to be aware that the attribute
value list is indeed a pointer.
Finally, as you can see there's only only one way to add new LDAP
entries, and it's called add(). It normally takes an LDAP::Entry object
instance as argument, but it can also be called with a regular hash
array if so desired.
Adding and removing attributes and values
This is the main functionality of this module. Use these methods to do
any modifications and updates to your LDAP entries.
addValue Add a value to an attribute. If the attribute value
already exists, or we couldn't add the value for any other
reason, we'll return FALSE \fIs0(0), otherwise we return
TRUE \fIs0(1). The first two arguments are the attribute
name, and the value to add.
The optional third argument is a flag, indicating that we
want to add the attribute without checking for duplicates.
This is useful if you know the values are unique already,
or if you perhaps want to allow duplicates for a
particular attribute. The fourth argument (again optional)
is a flag indicating that we want to perform DN
normalization on the attribute. The final, fifth, optional
argument indicates that the attribute values are case
insensitive (CIS).
To add a CN to an existing entry/attribute, do:
$entry->addValue("cn", "Leif Hedstrom");
addDNValue Just like addValue, except this method assume the value is
a DN attribute, and will enforce DN normalization. For
instance
$dn = "uid=Leif, dc=Netscape, dc=COM";
$entry->addDNValue("uniqueMember", $dn);
will only add the DN for "uid=leif" if it does not exist
as a DN in the uniqueMember attribute.
attrModified This is an internal function, that can be used to force
the API to consider an attribute (value) to have been
modified. The only argument is the name of the attribute.
In almost all situation, you never, ever, should call
this. If you do, please contact the developers, and as us
to fix the API. Example
$entry->attrModified("cn");
copy Copy the value of one attribute to another. Requires at
least two arguments. The first argument is the name of
the attribute to copy, and the second argument is the name
of the new attribute to copy to. The new attribute can
not currently exist in the entry, else the copy will fail.
There is an optional third argument (a boolean flag),
which, when set to 1, will force an override and copy to
the new attribute even if it already exists. Returns TRUE
if the copy was successful.
$entry->copy("cn", "description");
exists Return TRUE if the specified attribute is defined in the
LDAP entry. This is useful to know if an entry has a
particular attribute, regardless of the value. For
instance:
if ($entry->exists("jpegphoto")) { # do something special }
getDN Return the DN for the entry. For instance
print "The DN is: ", $entry->getDN(), "\n";
Just like setDN, this method also has an optional
argument, which indicates we should normalize the DN
before returning it to the caller.
getValues Returns an entire array of values for the attribute
specified. Note that this returns an array, and not a
pointer to an array. In a scalar context, this returns
the first value. This is different - this method used to
always return an array, which meant the array size in a
scalar context. If you need to get the array size, use
the size method described below.
@someArray = $entry->getValues("description");
$scalval = $entry->getValues("cn");
hasValue Return TRUE or FALSE if the attribute has the specified
value. A typical usage is to see if an entry is of a
certain object class, e.g.
if ($entry->hasValue("objectclass", "person", 1)) { # do something }
The (optional) third argument indicates if the string
comparison should be case insensitive or not, and the
(optional) fourth argument indicats wheter we should
normalize the string as if it was a DN. The first two
arguments are the name and value of the attribute,
respectively.
hasDNValue Exactly like hasValue, except we assume the attribute
values are DN attributes.
isAttr This method can be used to decide if an attribute name
really is a valid LDAP attribute in the current entry. Use
of this method is fairly limited, but could potentially be
useful. Usage is like previous examples, like
if ($entry->isAttr("cn")) { # do something }
The code section will only be executed if these criterias
are true:
1. The name of the attribute is a non-empty string.
2. The name of the attribute does not begin, and end, with an
underscore character (_).
2. The attribute has one or more values in the entry.
isDeleted This is almost identical to isModified, except it tests if
an attribute has been deleted. You use it the same way as
above, like
if (! $entry->isDeleted("cn")) { # do something }
isModified This is a somewhat more useful method, which will return
the internal modification status of a particular
attribute. The argument is the name of the attribute, and
the return value is True or False. If the attribute has
been modified, in any way, we return True (1), otherwise
we return False (0). For example:
if ($entry->isModified("cn")) { # do something }
isEntryModified
This is a wrapper over isModified(), and it will check if
any attribute in the entry object has been modified or
deleted.
matchValue This is very similar to hasValue, except it does a regular
expression match instead of a full string match. It takes
the same arguments, including the optional third argument
to specify case insensitive matching. The usage is
identical to the example for hasValue, e.g.
if ($entry->matchValue("objectclass", "pers", 1)) { # do something }
matchDNValue Like matchValue, except the attribute values are
considered being DNs.
move Identical to the copy method, except the original
attribute is deleted once the move to the new attribute is
complete.
$entry->move("cn", "sn");
printLDIF Print the entry in a format called LDIF (LDAP Data
Interchange Format, RFC xxxx). An example of an LDIF entry
is:
dn: uid=leif,ou=people,dc=netscape,dc=com
objectclass: top
objectclass: person
objectclass: inetOrgPerson
uid: leif
cn: Leif Hedstrom
mail: leif@netscape.com
The above would be the result of
$entry->printLDIF();
If you need to write to a file, open and then select() it.
For more useful LDIF functionality, check out the
Mozilla::LDAP::LDIF.pm module.
remove This will remove the entire attribute, including all it's
values, from the entry. The only argument is the name of
the attribute to remove. Let's say you want to nuke all
mailAlternateAddress values (i.e. the entire attribute
should be removed from the entry):
$entry->remove("mailAlternateAddress");
removeValue Remove a value from an attribute, if it exists. Of course,
if the attribute has no such value, we won't try to remove
it, and instead return a False (0) status code. The
arguments are the name of the attribute, and the
particular value to remove. Note that values are
considered case sensitive, so make sure you preserve case
properly. An example is:
$entry->removeValue("objectclass", "nscpPerson");
removeDNValue
This is almost identical to removeValue, except it will
normalize the attribute values before trying to remove
them. This is useful if you know that the attribute is a
DN value, but perhaps the values are not cosistent in all
LDAP entries. For example
$dn = "uid=Leif, dc=Netscape, dc=COM";
$entry->removeDNValue("owner", $dn);
will remove the owner "uid=leif,dc=netscape,dc=com", no
matter how it's capitalized and formatted in the entry.
setDN Set the DN to the specified value. Only do this on new
entries, it will not work well if you try to do this on an
existing entry. If you wish to rename an entry, use the
Mozilla::Conn::modifyRDN method instead. Eventually we'll
provide a complete "rename" method. To set the DN for a
newly created entry, we can do
$entry->setDN("uid=leif,ou=people,dc=netscape,dc=com");
There is an optional third argument, a boolean flag,
indicating that we should normalize the DN before setting
it. This will assure a consistent format of your DNs.
setValues Set the specified attribute to the new value (or values),
overwriting whatever old values it had before. This is a
little dangerous, since you can lose attribute values you
didn't intend to remove. Therefore, it's usually
recommended to use removeValue() and setValues(). If you
know exactly what the new values should be like, you can
use this method like
$entry->setValues("cn", "Leif Hedstrom", "The Swede");
$entry->setValues("mail", @mailAddresses);
or if it's a single value attribute,
$entry->setValues("uidNumber", "12345");
size Return the number of values for a particular attribute.
For instance
$entry->{cn} = [ "Leif Hedstrom", "The Swede" ];
$numVals = $entry->size("cn");
This will set $numVals to two (2). The only argument is
the name of the attribute, and the return value is the
size of the value array.
Deleting entries
To delete an LDAP entry from the LDAP server, you have to use the
delete method from the Mozilla::LDAP::Conn module. It will actually
delete any entry, if you provide an legitimate DN.
Renaming entries
Again, there's no functionality in this object class to rename the
entry (i.e. changing it's DN). For now, there is a way to modify the
RDN component of a DN through the Mozilla::LDAP::Conn module, with
modifyRDN. Eventually we hope to have a complete rename method, which
should be capable of renaming any entry, in any way, including moving
it to a different part of the DIT (Directory Information Tree).
EXAMPLES
There are plenty of examples to look at, in the examples directory. We
are adding more examples every day (almost).
INSTALLATION
Installing this package is part of the Makefile supplied in the
package. See the installation procedures which are part of this
package.
AVAILABILITY
This package can be retrieved from a number of places, including:
http://www.mozilla.org/directory/
Your local CPAN server
CREDITS
Most of this code was developed by Leif Hedstrom, Netscape
Communications Corporation.
BUGS
None. :)
SEE ALSO
Mozilla::LDAP::Conn, Mozilla::LDAP::API, and of course Perl.
perl v5.16.3 2007-06-14 Entry(3)