Re: ldap forms?

["Seth Thornberry" <seth.thornberry@pcca.com>]

> You know, this is the sort of thing that I really hate. The thing is
> that there are right technologies and wrong technologies..

It is an annoying situation, but the idea does have a place.

> Web500gw works just fine. I've never seen anyone screw that up... I
> think you should blow off re-inventing the wheel. If this becomes a
> problem, then:
>
> ou=People, o=Whatever Co., c=US
> objectclass: organizationalUnit
> description: people in Whatever Co.
> ou: People>
> ou=People, o=Whatever Co., c=US
> objectclass: organizationalUnit
> description: people in Whatever Co.
> ou: People
>
> And then put everyone under people, make aliases in other ou's to them,
> and set the basedn for web500gw to:
> ou=People, o=Whatever Co., c=US
>
> Sure it's limiting, and you can't browse the whole structure, but who
> cares.



That doesn't really solve the problem the PHB was having. He was using the
search box for global searches from any page. ie. He's looking at user joe
blow, decides he needs to see Jane Doe, and puts her name in the search box.
Doesn't work because the context for the search box is still set to joe
blow, and Jane Doe is not listed under that. Intuitively his actions aren't
really all that odd. Granted, I may have missed a setting or something in
web500gw that turns this behavior off, but the interface is still kinda bad
when you get full page of superficial header information, and no
navigational links until the next page.

> As for Start->Find->People, Like I said, that's how it works... Put an
> alias on the desktop for it, if it really gets bad. There are just some
> things about technology that poeple have to LEARN to live with. And
> wasting time re-inventing the wheel is stupid.

> I guess all i'm saying is that making this thing is a waste of time, and
> secondly its not that tough to learn, so if you have to distribute a
> document or siomething, that is better than coding this from scratch.

In our situation, we've got around 400 remote locations that we have no
simple way to add our directory server definitions to quickly. We will set
them up in OE for the directory server eventually -- but for the moment my
worry is about replacing our old address book system (a flat file with the
list of names that we searched through with an old perl script). I've hacked
together a solution that works in a familiar way, 400 locations now do not
have to re-learn how to look up addresses. I don't see that this is anymore
of a waste of time than any of the other solutions you mentioned. If anyone
needs something similar, I'll make my little shell script available. (It's
real simple. Basically 'echo "Location: ldap://[directoryserver]/ etc..') I
acknowledge the limited usefulness of it.


Seth Thornberry
http://chaos.greeny.org/~deadpan