Hi all!
I did some research about accessing LDAP from Groovy, in order to create
some simple scripts. Has anybody tried this out already?
Anyway, this is what I got so far: It is possible to use both JNDI and
libraries like Netscape or Novell SDK from Groovy (you can basically use
any Java library in Groovy scripts).
But these approaches have disadvantages. Netscape SDK is plain LDAP, so
the scripts look like one familiar to LDAP would expect. But the API is
not connected very well to the Collection API, so sometimes it is not
easy to use the result from Groovy. And you have a non-standard
dependency. JNDI on the other hand is easier to use (exists in every
VM), but the scripts look *horrible*, because of the LDAP abstraction
JNDI does. For instance you have to type "entry.nameInNamespace" instead
of "entry.DN" (Netscape). Igitt.
It seems that there does no special solution/library for Groovy and LDAP
exist. So I started to create a little prototype (!). Basically, it is a
wrapper which uses JNDI (in order to omit the dependency to a
non-standard library) under the hood, but looks like LDAP from the
outside (script).
The following as an example how a script which uses it looks like:
---
import org.apache.directory.groovyldap.*
con = new LDAPConnection(hostname: 'zanzibar', port: 10389)
con.connect('uid=admin,ou=system', 'secret');
// anonymous bind:
// con.connect()
// Simple entry lookup via dn
tori = con.read('cn=Tori Amos,dc=example,dc=com')
println "DN: ${tori.dn}"
println "Common name: ${tori.attrs.cn}"
println "Object classes: ${tori.attrs.objectclass}"
println ""
// search op
results = con.search('dc=example,dc=com', SearchScope.ONE,
'(objectClass=*)')
for (result in results) {
entry = result.object
println entry.attrs.cn
}
con.disconnect()
---
output, if run by Groovy interpreter:
DN: cn=Tori Amos,dc=example,dc=com
Common name: Tori Amos
Object classes: ["person", "organizationalPerson", "inetOrgPerson", "top"]
Tori Amos
Kate Bush
---
But there still some design decision. For instance, I would prefer
writting "tori.cn" instead of "tori.attrs.cn", but my current solution
with does work like this yet (it is feasible).
Anyway. Should I sandbox my little prototype, create a cwiki page about
how to use it, and wait and see whether other Groovy users are
interested in it? Or is it not worth the effort?
If it goes well, it may be a start for a new tiny litle sub-project
("GLDAP", "GroovyLDAP", or whatever) within Directory, which may be
useful for some people.
What do you think about it?
Greetings from Hamburg,
Stefan
