Working with the directory service through LDAP

You can start work immediately with the LDAP directory service of the University of Michigan after the installation process has been successfully performed. Fortunately, there is a public access test for functionality without having any additional prerequisites. All you need is an internet connection not blocking TCP/IP-port 386 or 636. Two preconfigured profiles inside the software help you to start working with the Userbooster software. Profiles are necessary to save all the information relating to a connection to the directory service using LDAP. Theses settings are written into a centralized xml configuration file called ub.xml. All password information inside this file will be always saved in an encrypted format. Optionally you can also keep the whole file in an encrypted format, if security reasons make it necessary. The software works with an extreme powerful rule-based framework to get the results back from the LDAP directory very quickly in the most efficient way.

The results are presented in a list view or tree view. In the bottom area you have the message log window containing the trace information when sending the LDAP requests to the directory service.

The main window can be easily switched to list view merely by selecting the preferred view in the context menu. The desired attributes can be selected through the internal LDAP schema dialog. Here you will configure the general settings using all the LDAP requests. Additionally you can specify so called attribute categories, which enables you to collect some attributes associated to the given profile configuration. This makes it easy to define the optimal conditions when searching for the interesting objects with the specified attributes in the directory service.

You even can enhance the attribute list with the schema explorer. This makes it easy to support customized object types with their attributes in the user interface of the software. The common attributes are part of predefined attribute list. To use the attributes in the LDAP queries, which will be modify the values, at least the flags Use in import/export and Write have to be checked. The object class also has to be set properly. You can specify any unknown object class definition inside the configuration file ub.xml. The message log contains the trace information when sending LDAP requests to the directory service.

The necessary LDAP operation will be determined automatically by the runtime. This means, you can repeat the process as long as you want without modifying the LDIF file configuration, for example.