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Re: return an attribute of all users belonging to a group



--On Sunday, April 17, 2011 1:07 PM +0300 George Mamalakis <mamalos@eng.auth.gr> wrote:

Dear all,

I have a question regarding my openldap DIT design. My design so far is
based on the model: ou=people,dc=example,dc=com. It is very possible that
I'll have to be able to find attributes of people belonging to some
specific group (eg, student, postgrad, etc). The easiest way to address
this issue for me would be to branch my DIT like this:

ou=undergrads,ou=people,dc=example,dc=com and
ou=postgrads,ou=people,dc=example,dc=com. On the other hand, I have
several classes that I would like to distinguish my users to apart from
this (like stuff, student, professors, etc.) but further sub-brunching
shows to me that there's something wrong with my design (since those
classes may dynamically change in the future).

This is a terrible way to organize things. Just use an attribute to store group membership in the actual persons entries. It is quite common for people to end up in more than one group. By using an attribute in the user entry, then you can also easily create dynamic groups as well.

You may want to look at:

<http://www.stanford.edu/services/directory/trees/people.html>

particularly things like "suAffiliation", "suDisplayAffiliation", "suPrimaryOrganizationID", "suPrivilegeGroup", etc. EduPerson has some useful attributes as well, but doesn't necessarily cover the full scope of things you might want.

--Quanah



--

Quanah Gibson-Mount
Sr. Member of Technical Staff
Zimbra, Inc
A Division of VMware, Inc.
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