Re: Search and print unique LDAP attribute values.

On Sep 14, 2012, at 12:13 AM, Chris Ridd wrote:

> 
> On 13 Sep 2012, at 20:47, "Stierwalt, Kyle" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> New to Perl, what I'm trying to do is print out the unique values for a given LDAP attribute.

to directly snswer your question, if @results really does contain all the unique values the code is:


foreach (@result) {print $_;}


> 
> By definition the values in a given stored LDAP attribute have to be all unique, so most of your problem "goes away": @result is simply @a!

I'm pretty sure that the method here will only work with single-valued attributes.

How I do it (our ldap server provides a large mix of single-value and multi-value attributes) is outlined in the pods for Net::LDAP:

http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/perl-ldap-0.4001/lib/Net/LDAP/Examples.pod 
http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/perl-ldap-0.4001/lib/Net/LDAP/Search.pod

Look for using for using as_struct():

as_struct ( )
Returns a reference to a HASH, where the keys are the DNs of the results and the values are HASH references. These second level HASHes hold the attributes such that the keys are the attribute names, in lowercase, and the values are references to an ARRAY holding the values.

In practice my code looks like this (the script is generating an html page)

$mesg = $ldaps->search (  # perform a search
                               base => $searchBase,
                               filter => $searchFilter
                               );

$mesg->code && die $mesg->error;
        	
my $searchhash = $mesg->as_struct;

my @returnedDNs = keys %$searchhash; #Each member of @returnedDNs is equivalent to $mesg->entry(N); one element for each returned record.

my ($dn,$valref, @attrnames, $attr,$attrval, $actval);

foreach $dn (@returnedDNs){
	print "<tr><td colspan=2><b>$dn Data</b></td></tr>";
	$valref = $$searchhash{$dn}; #Returns a pointer to the hash of attribute{value arrays} for this dn result. 
	@attrnames = sort keys %$valref; #this gets me an array of the value names, as the hash that $valref points to
	foreach $attr (@attrnames){ #now cycle through each attribute
		$attrval = @$valref{$attr};# get a pointer to the value array for each attribute
		foreach $actval (@$attrval){# cycle through the array of values for each attribute
			print "<tr><td><b>$attr</b></td><td>$actval</td></tr>"
		}
	}
}


-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs