Re: weighted valsort for telephone Numbers

[Bill MacAllister <whm@stanford.edu>]

--On Monday, February 11, 2013 10:53:05 PM +0100 Benin Technologies <benintechnologies@yahoo.fr> wrote:

> thanks for that info
>
> how do you use that control ? I tried the following :
>
> ldapsearch -x -W -D "cn=admin,dc=company,dc=com" -b "ou=people,dc=company,dc=com" -s subtree -e 1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.666.5.14
>
> I get :
> # search result
> search: 2
> result: 2 Protocol error
> text: valSort control value is absent

Good luck with that.  I never did figure out how to get this back from
ldapsearch.  I worked on the for a couple hours about a year ago, and
I didn't save any of my tests.  I am not a C hacker, but as I remember
between reading the code and testing I got closer by base64 encoding
the ber encoded value for the control and using that on the command
line.  But, don't hold me to that, and I never did get it to work.

It is fairly straight froward to do in perl.  Here is a snipet of the
important bits.  You don't need the GSSAPI parts, but it was easier
to leave them in.

use Net::LDAP;
use Net::LDAP::Control;
use Convert::ASN1;
use MIME::Base64;
use Authen::SASL;

# Set up the value to be used for the control
my $asn = Convert::ASN1->new;
$asn->prepare('SEQUENCE { b BOOLEAN }');
my $pdu = $asn->encode(b=>1); # or 1

# Create the control
my $ValSortControl=Net::LDAP::Control->new(
 type     => "1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.666.5.14",
 critical => 0,
 value    => $pdu
);

$ldap = Net::LDAP->new( "$opt_host" ) or die "$@";
$sasl = Authen::SASL->new(GSSAPI);
$status = $ldap->bind("", sasl=>$sasl);
$status = $ldap->search(base    => $opt_base,
                       scope   => 'sub',
                       filter  => $filter,
                       attrs   => [@attrs],
                       control => [ $ValSortControl ]);


Bill

> Le 11/02/2013 22:05, Bill MacAllister a Ãcrit :
> > --On Monday, February 11, 2013 09:42:55 PM +0100 Benin Technologies
> > <benintechnologies@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> >
> > > thanks, I agree, first I thought that weighted valsort could be used
> > > to give an importance grade to a set of attributes, but I agree, it
> > > seems it is of much limited use
> > >
> > > (other limitation : it's quite impossible to delete/modify a
> > > weighted entry, because you need to include the weight ({3} for
> > > example) in the LDIF delete/modify instruction file. Given that the
> > > weight value is never returned by searches, it's impossible to know
> > > that weight, thus impossible to delete the attribute, unless that
> > > information has been stored somewhere else)
> >
> > To perform a search that returns the weighted values the control
> > LDAP_CONTROL_VALSORT (1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.666.5.14) must be specified.
> >
> > Bill



--

Bill MacAllister
Infrastructure Delivery Group, Stanford University