Re: ldif reading/writing problem

[Chris R. <chr...@me...>]

Andrew Tristan <atr...@ac...> wrote:
> Whoops, transcription error on my part.  I tried a bunch of different
> things; when I typed that message, I mistakenly combined several
> different things.  I should have just cut/pasted my actual code rather
> than typing it out.  
> 
> One of the things I'm trying to do is to remove openLDAP's time stamp
> attributes.  The first thing I did was,
> 
> $ldifEntry->delete('creatorsname','modifiersname',
> 			'createtimestamp','modifytimestamp');

Well you aren't allowed to do that on a server anyway, since those
attributes are classed as not user modifiable. (This is irrespective of
access controls.)

It'll work using an LDIF file of course.

> which results in,
> 
> Can't use string ("modifiersname") as an ARRAY ref while "strict refs" 
> in use at /inst/pkg-ver/perl-5.6.1/lib/site_perl/Net/LDAP/Entry.pm line
> 179, <GEN0> line 2.
> 
> Am I missing a typo there somewhere?  The next thing I thought was, "oh
> yeah, I should be passing a reference to that list"; this is what the
> perl-ldap docs suggest (the documentation for the delete method says
> 'delete ( [ ATTR [, ATTR2 ... ]] )'), is that incorrect, or am I
> misunderstanding something?  So I tried passing a reference to that
> anonymous array, like so,

Yes, that's confusing. Do the outer square brackets indicate optional
parameters, or literally square brackets?

> $ldifEntry->delete(['creatorsname',...]);
> 
> this runs without error, but also doesn't remove those attributes.  

The guts of the delete method is a loop that takes pairs of things from the
argument list, a type and a value. So try this:

	$ldifEntry->delete('creatorsname' => [],
			   'createtimestamp' => []);

That seems to work for me.

I've never really used Net::LDAP::Entry objects like this myself, so there
may be a much better way to do it.

Cheers,

Chris