[Freeipa-devel] LDAP connections and the new ldap backend plugin

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 10:03 -0500, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 11:54 -0500, Rob Crittenden wrote:
> > Jason Gerard DeRose wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 08:49 -0700, Rich Megginson wrote: 
> > >> I'm not sure I understand.  If the connection object is 
> > >> ipaserver.ipaldap.IPAdmin which is a subclass of SimpleLDAPObject, can't 
> > >> the connection object be "cast" and used directly as a 
> > >> SimpleLDAPObject?  Or does the IPA code change/overload the methods such 
> > >> that it is not usable any more as a SimpleLDAPObject?
> > > 
> > > The subclass overrides methods, so code written against SimpleLDAPObject
> > > would probably break.
> > 
> > My concern is that we use this object in more places than just the 
> > XML-RPC server. What is this going to mean for those? I suppose just 
> > more complicated setup code though I guess we could write a few methods 
> > to handle that.
> > 
> > How do you propse handling the other methods in IPAdmin such as 
> > getEntry, deleteEntry, etc?
> 
> I am wondering if we should really worry that plugins can't use our ldap
> object.
> 
> Existing code would probably have to be adapted to our tree/conventions,
> otherwise it will probably do something stupid with the tree anyway.
> I am wondering if actually forcing adaptation of the code is actually a
> good idea so that people don't throw garbage in ?

I'm talking about gluing existing code into IPA via a site-specific or
3rd-party plugin... the plugin need not be in our source tree and can
import code from Python modules maintained in still other trees.

Because the python-ldap bindings are the standard Python interface to
LDAP, I think people will appreciate that we allow them to use that
interface directly.  I think lots of sysadmins have small scripts and
libraries they would like to be able to integrate with IPA without a
major rewrite.

Keeping this layer separated will also make my favorite thing easier:
unit testing.  ;)

> Simo.
> 
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