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Re: [Fwd: 2 identical names in address book]


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