5 Usage

Overview

As noted in the Introduction, DirectoryService is inspired by GORM. Therefore, the methods should be intuitive. This section gives you a brief overview, but please see the Reference Guide for details of each method.

How it Works

For more in-depth details of how DirectoryService works, please see the other sections of this guide, including the ref:DirectoryService pages.

Add DirectoryService to your class

Once you have DirectoryService configured, you can add it to a class the way you would any other service:

def directoryService

Search for an object

Now you can search for something in your directory (again, see the Configuration section) like this:

def people = directoryService.findPeopleWhere('departmentNumber':'12345', 'manager':'3786258')

The above will return a list of DirectoryServiceEntry objects. A DirectoryServiceEntry object is a wrapper around an UnboundID Entry object, so everything you can do with an Entry object is available to you.

Use the results

Once you perform a search, you can then use the object the way you would use a GORM object:

people.each { person ->
    println "${person.displayName}, ${person.telephoneNumber}"
}

Now you might say, but this is LDAP, so what happens if the person does not have a telephoneNumber defined in their entry? Nothing! The attribute doesn't exist, it doesn't print anything. This is possible because DirectoryService is based on the UnboundID LDAP SDK, and that SDK allows you to ask for attribute values on attributes that do not exist in the entry, with no ill effects, i.e., no exceptions are thrown. However, the call does return null if there is no attribute with the provided name, so it is best to use the "?" operator if you plan to do something with the value, if that something you plan to do does not like null objects.

To see how the UnboundID LDAP SDK is being used here, the above person.displayName could also be accomplished with the following:

person.getEntry().getAttributeValue("displayName")

As you can see, we are calling getAttributeValue, so if you want the attribute values, then you would have to use the special Values() method:

person.cnValues()

This returns a String array.

Operations Implemented

As of the current release, find (search), and save (modify) are implemented. add and delete will be added in upcoming releases. See the roadmap for details.