Disclaimer: I’m not an LDAP expert, but I’ve done a whole mess of reading about OpenLDAP lately. Let the knowledgeable correct me where I err.

Paging in LDAP is somewhat of a pain, and by “somewhat” I mean “asymptotically approaching totally”. In the ldapsearch tool, for example, you have to use a “search extension” argument, as paging is not part of the search filter syntax. This is as opposed to SQL queries, where you may specify a LIMIT and OFFSET in the WHERE clause. Thus LDAP clients must implement the pagedResults search control (and the LDAP directory server must support it).

It gets worse. Check out the way the paging is implemented when following RFC 2696 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2696.html). You can only specify the size of the result set, not the offset or a page number. The LDAP server returns a cookie with the search results. The client uses the cookie in the next pagedResults query, and the server uses the cookie to figure out where to start the next set of results. LDAP clients must treat the cookie as opaque, i.e. they shouldn’t know how to do anything other than send the cookie back to the server.

Thus the only way to paginate results on the server side appears to be by looping through all results. The client must retain a cookie from each query for use in the next. Hrmmm. Can you guess who wrote RFC 2696?

At the time of this writing, there are two Ruby libraries for LDAP access, and ActiveLdap can use either as its adapter. To the extent that Net::LDAP supports the pagedResults control, it is only to prevent ActiveDirectory from choking when a query returns more than 1000 results. See ./lib/net/ldap.rb:1158 for the code that handles the pagedResult control.

Ruby/LDAP does support pagedResults, which I should have figured out from the line in the TODO file that started the discussion on the mailing list that started my research: “Add result pagination via LDAP::Controls”. So I think adding support for the control to the Ruby/LDAP adapter for ActiveLdap should be practical.

It might be possible to roll your own pagination, in a very ugly way, by calling the ActiveLdap::Base#search method with a block that throws away results before and after the desired page set. Net::LDAP yields each entry *after* adding it to the result_set array, so you would need to set the entry to nil and compact the result.

Alternatively, perhaps you could override the Net::LDAP search method to yield the entry to the block first, then add it to the result_set only if not nil.

It’s ugly every way you look.

Here’s the link that started my digging:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/195249

Disclaimer: I’m not an LDAP expert, but I’ve done a whole mess of reading about OpenLDAP lately. Let the knowledgeable correct me where I err.

Paging in LDAP is somewhat of a pain, and by “somewhat” I mean “asymptotically approaching totally”. In the ldapsearch tool, for example, you have to use a “search extension” argument, as paging is not part of the search filter syntax. This is as opposed to SQL queries, where you may specify a LIMIT and OFFSET in the WHERE clause. Thus LDAP clients must implement the pagedResults search control (and the LDAP directory server must support it).

It gets worse. Check out the way the paging is implemented when following RFC 2696 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2696.html). You can only specify the size of the result set, not the offset or a page number. The LDAP server returns a cookie with the search results. The client uses the cookie in the next pagedResults query, and the server uses the cookie to figure out where to start the next set of results. LDAP clients must treat the cookie as opaque, i.e. they shouldn’t know how to do anything other than send the cookie back to the server.

Thus the only way to paginate results on the server side appears to be by looping through all results. The client must retain a cookie from each query for use in the next. Hrmmm. Can you guess who wrote RFC 2696?

At the time of this writing, there are two Ruby libraries for LDAP access, and ActiveLdap can use either as its adapter. To the extent that Net::LDAP supports the pagedResults control, it is only to prevent ActiveDirectory from choking when a query returns more than 1000 results. See ./lib/net/ldap.rb:1158 for the code that handles the pagedResult control.

Ruby/LDAP does support pagedResults, which I should have figured out from the line in the TODO file that started the discussion on the mailing list that started my research: “Add result pagination via LDAP::Controls”. So I think adding support for the control to the Ruby/LDAP adapter for ActiveLdap should be practical.

It might be possible to roll your own pagination, in a very ugly way, by calling the ActiveLdap::Base#search method with a block that throws away results before and after the desired page set. Net::LDAP yields each entry *after* adding it to the result_set array, so you would need to set the entry to nil and compact the result.

Alternatively, perhaps you could override the Net::LDAP search method to yield the entry to the block first, then add it to the result_set only if not nil.

It’s ugly every way you look.

Here’s the link that started my digging:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/195249

Today was the second time I had to research the same problem with OpenLDAP and ActiveLdap. I have no idea what happened to the solution that I found and employed, but it’s gone. Can’t find it. No love from grep.

The problem is this error in ActiveLdap

 
 undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass - (NoMethodError)
 ../active_ldap/adapter/base.rb:99:in `schema'
 

The solution is to add two ACL lines to my slapd.conf or one of its includes:

 
 access to dn.base="" by * read
 access to dn.base="cn=Subschema" by * read
 

The reason why come is that ActiveLdap apparently queries anonymously for the schema, and my acls are too mean and stingy. If you start your development with strict ACLs, you hit the problem early. If you wait until near deployment-time to tighten up the security, you will be surprised when stuff just stops working.

You can see whether your ACLs are preventing access to the schema by running the following ldapsearch command:

ldapsearch -xh www.example.com -b '' -s base subschemaSubentry

If the result doesn’t look something like the example below, then you can try adding the two ACL lines above. The important section is the second, where you see that the value of subschemaSubentry is ‘cn=Subschema’

 
 # extended LDIF
 #
 # LDAPv3
 # base  with scope base
 # filter: (objectclass=*)
 # requesting: subschemaSubentry 
 #

 #
 dn:
 subschemaSubentry: cn=Subschema

 # search result
 search: 2
 result: 0 Success

 # numResponses: 2
 # numEntries: 1
 

After I started using :adapter => 'net_ldap' in ActiveLdap, my belongs_to associations all broke with when constructing a search filter with Net::LDAP

invalid filter syntax (Net::LDAP::LdapError)

The classes look something like this:

 class Person  'uid', :prefix => 'ou=people', 
       :classes => ['top', 'mozillaAddressBookEntry']
   belongs_to :family, :class => 'Family', 
      :foreign_key => 'dn', :primary_key => 'member'
 end
 
 class Family  'uid', :prefix => 'ou=families', 
       :classes => ['top','family', 'mozillaAddressBookEntry']
   has_many :people, :class => 'Person', 
      :wrap => 'member', :primary_key => 'dn'
 end
 

As I found out per this thread, Ruby Net::LDAP apparently can’t handle search filters with “=” or “,” characters, and doesn’t allow escaping with “\3D” or the like.

I switched back to the default Ruby/LDAP adapter, and the belongs_to associations work as expected.

Prior to version 0.8.2, ActiveLdap required Ruby/LDAP for its underlying connection. This posed an annoyance, if not a problem, as Ruby/LDAP does not exist as a gem. As of 0.8.2, ActiveLdap supports both Ruby/LDAP and the bona fide, gemified Net::LDAP.

The default connection is still Ruby/LDAP, however, and the official docs aren’t abundantly clear on how to make the connections with Net::LDAP. I couldn’t find an answer with Google until after I had puzzled it out myself and was about to write this post. Googling for the answer found for me this post to the ActiveLdap mailing list, which is mostly correct. The value for :adapter should be ‘net_ldap’, not ‘net-ldap’, according to the Constants list at the very bottom of the front page of the Rdocs for ActiveLdap.

Thus:

ActiveLdap::Base.establish_connection(
 :adapter => 'net_ldap',
 :host => 'localhost',
 :base => 'dc=mycooldomain,dc=com', 
 # doo wa doo shbop
 )