Op vrijdag 23-05-2008 om 12:08 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Brian Thompson:

Thomas De Reyck wrote:

...

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask this kind of information, so if I am mistaken, I apologize..

I am quite new to LDAP, however I have used some applications that require it and am now a semi-decent openLDAP administrator. So, as a next step, I am trying to program an address book with an LDAP backend. I have noticed that usually the cn is used as a dn when working with address book entries. This seems to lead to an interesting conflict which I need to resolve before I begin to program:

What can be done when one has to import 2 people with an identical name?

This seems to be irrelevant, since the chances of an identical name are small, but I for one know 2 people with the same first and last ames. Lets face it: names are not MD5 hashes ;-)..

I guess someone must have thought this over before.. how oes one resolve this problem cleanly? Does one use another property? f so, which one?

I am aware that this might be a very silly question, but I have een wondering about this for a few days now and google doesn't eem to satisfy my need for a solution.. :-).

Thanks in advance, Thomas De Reyck

We use the UID attribute as the first portion of the DN, which is an id unique to every student/faculty/staff. That solves the issue of conflicting DNs.

Regarding the CN attribute, in our directory the CN attribute is multivalued and contains several permutations of their name ("first initial last name", "first name middle initial last name", etc) so it's very common for searches to come up with multiple matches when searching by name.

Best you can do when searching only by name and two people have the same name is to show the search results with some additional info from their entries such as title, department, bldg, etc and hope the end user can figure out who is who.

-Brian

This is indeed a valid solution, and it has crossed my mind a few times before.. However, I find it to be a bit impractical to have to assign UID's to people in an address book..

Does anyone maybe have a somewhat more elegant solution in mind?