LDAP - Binary values

[janz@stud.uni-frankfurt.de (Rudolf Janz)]

Hello,
I have a couple of questions, these are not OpenLDAP specific.

If an attribute for example has the syntax INTEGER, then it is encoded as
an ASN.1 integer in LDAP, if I understood it correctly. But how does the
C-API handle integers, do you have to use the binary value and then decode
it with ber_scanf?

A more general question, I'd like to write a gateway using the C-API, which
translates the LDAP requests and responses.
The problem is: this gateway, does not know the schema, is there enough
information to decide which types the values have? For example how do I
distinguish between binary data and strings, it seems they are both written
with the same tag. 
  Rudolf Janz