perl-ldap-dev

Re: Testing for missing attributes

[<Sim...@wi...>]

Thanks folks, that got it !

      FWIW, I eventually found that the attribute Novell show as Last Login in
       Console One maps to an LDAP attribute loginTime, not lastLoginTime as you
       might expect :-)

      Anyone know the difference ?

      Simon.



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Re: Testing for missing attributes

[<Sim...@wi...>]

This may well be my understanding at fault ;-)

      What I am testing for is when a user last logged in.

      It seems that Novell doesn't actually create an attribute of loginTime (or
      lastLoginTime) until a user has logged in for the first time.

      So when I test my $entry->get('loginTime') I get undef, i.e. there is no
      attribute loginTime.

      Looking in the debug traces it seems that the attribute is not returned by
      the server.

      I've seen this behaviour from Novell when a user does not have rights to
      an attribute.

      I would have expected that the attribute would exist even if it was a zero
      length string.

      In that case, $entry->get('loginTime') should return an array ref, the
      first element of which was zero length.

      Does that make sense ?

      Anyway, I've managed to get around the problem (with an appropriate search
      filter) so this is now just a user (i.e. me) education issue now :-)

      Thanks to all for their help.

      Cheers,

      Simon Wilcox.






               From           Chris Ridd <chr...@me...>
  Date   21 November 2000
                                                                            
                                                                            
        To                                                                  
                Simon Wilcox/BASE/WilliamsLea@WilliamsLea,  Time  14:15     
                per...@li...                         
                                                                            


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      Subject       Re: Testing for missing attributes





Sim...@wi... wrote:
>       It seems that Novell does not return an attribute at all rather
>       than an attribute that has a null value.

I'm not quite sure what this means.

It is not legal in LDAP to have an attribute with no values. Some
attributes have syntaxes which support values which are zero-length
strings, which is *not* the same as 'no value'. (Example: distinguished
names can be zero-length, ie the root has a string DN of "".)

Cheers,

Chris









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Re: Testing for missing attributes

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

Sim...@wi... wrote:
>       Looking in the debug traces it seems that the attribute is not
>       returned by the server.

That's correct behaviour.

>       I've seen this behaviour from Novell when a user does not have
>       rights to an attribute.

That's entirely possible.

>       I would have expected that the attribute would exist even if it was
>       a zero length string.

That would depend on the schema. I suspect having a zero length value would
not make sense (what time would that represent?)

Cheers,

Chris