Provided by: libmozilla-ldap-perl_1.5.3-1build1_amd64 bug

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 whether
                    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.