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



Op vrijdag 23-05-2008 om 12:08 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Brian
Thompson:
> 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
> 

This is indeed a valid solution, and it has crossed my mind a few times
before.. However, I find it to be a bit impractical to have to assign
UID's to people in an address book..

Does anyone maybe have a somewhat more elegant solution in mind?

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