Re: Extending Open LDAP

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 05:47 PM 6/30/99 -0400, Philip A. Waligora wrote:
>Hi everyone,
> 
>I have quite a question for you guys......
> 
>I work for U of M's medical IT department.  We're working on a project to
>integrate LDAP and PIDS (a CORBA based directory service) so that an LDAP
>client can access the PIDS data.
>
>Does anyone out there know how wwe could either configure teh server or
>perhaps even re-werite the search funtion in teh source code so that
>whenever a search request is sent the server will issue a system call to
>start teh PIDS client?  I'd like the PIDS client to grab the sesarch
>filter sent by teh client, search teh PIDS server's data, write the
>results to a file and then have teh LDAP server send out a system call to
>execute the ldapadd command to add teh results to the server's database
>and after that is done the "real" search will be done and sent back to the
>original LDAP client.  I was looking through teh source code trying to
>understand it today....if I go to the slapd/search.c file and alter teh
>do_search() function to do that, do you think it would work?

Sounds like you want to implement an LDAP to PIDS gateway.  Sounds
like you are complicating it with storage into a separate backend.
I would suggest implementing a simple gateway at first.

A search only gateway is very easy to write.  You can use one of
the programmable backends, ie: back-shell, back-perl, or back-tcl
(the last two being devel-only).  Or you can take back-passwd
and modify it to do to the PIDS query and return results.

In devel, there is also back-ldap which LDAP-to-LDAP gateway which
might serve as an additional example.

There is also a CORBA backend under development.  You might search
the list archives for details.

Kurt