What's In A Name? - PHP

Among its many other capabilities, PHP also comes with afull-featured API to connect to, and communicate with, LDAP directoryservers. This article explores how PHP and LDAP can be used together,beginning with a crash course in LDAP basics and proceeding to a series ofsimple examples that demonstrate how PHP can be used to search an LDAPdirectory and format the results for the Web.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

By: Harish Kamath, (c) Melonfire

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April 04, 2003

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SEARCH DEV SHED

TOOLS YOU CAN USE

The example on the previous page was fairly static - all it did was return a list of all the entries in the directory that had a "cn" attribute. This next example makes things a little more interactive - it includes a form where the user can enter a name and search the LDAP server for that name.

Here's the form,

<html>
<head>
<title>Search</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="search.php" method="POST">
<input type="text" name="name" length="30">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value = "Search">
</form>
</body>
</html>

and here's what it looks like:

And here's the code for the search script:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<?php
// specify the LDAP server to connect to
$conn = ldap_connect("localhost") or die("Could not connect to server");  
// bind to the LDAP server specified above 
$r = ldap_bind($conn) or die("Could not bind to server");     
// create the search string
$query = "(cn=" . $_POST['name'] . ")";
// start searching
// specify both the start location and the search criteria
// in this case, start at the top and return all entries $result =
ldap_search($conn,"dc=my-domain,dc=com", $query) or die ("Error in search
query");  
// get entry data as array
$info = ldap_get_entries($conn, $result);
// iterate over array and print data for each entry
echo "<ul>";
for ($i=0; $i<$info["count"]; $i++) 
{
echo "<li>" . $info[$i]["cn"][0] ." - ".$info[$i]["mail"][0] . "</li>";
} echo "</ul>";
// print number of entries found
echo "Number of entries found: " . ldap_count_entries($conn, $result) .
"<p>";
// all done? clean up
ldap_close($conn);
?>
</body>
</html>

The only difference between this script and the previous one is that this time, the search criteria is dynamically generated using the data POSTed from the form.


$query = "(cn=" . $_POST['name'] . ")";

This parameter is then passed to the ldap_search() function and processed in the standard manner.

Here's what you should see, assuming that you searched for the string "joe":

Simple when you know how, isn't it?

And that's about it for this first part. In the second part of this article, I will be showing you how to carry out more complex searches, and also add and delete information from the LDAP directory. Stay tuned for that one.and, until next time, stay healthy!

Note: Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!