Company Directory (LDAP)

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4D v15

4D v15 includes new features allowing your 4D application to connect to an existing company directory using the LDAP protocol. New commands of the "LDAP" theme provide tools for logging into a company directory server such as MS Active Directory, and querying it.

These new commands allow you to:

use the Windows session login and password to grant access to your 4D application (if using MS Active directory) so that the end user only needs to remember a single password,
query the corporate directory to retrieve user information such as full name, email, phone number, office building, groups the person belongs to, etc.

Note: LDAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an open standard for accessing and maintaining distributed information services. For more information, please refer to the Wikipedia page on LDAP or the OpenLDAP Software main page.

In 4D, an LDAP connection is opened using LDAP LOGIN. It is then bound to the current 4D process and must be closed using LDAP LOGOUT, or when the process terminates its execution.

Glossary

Here is a list of the main acronyms used in the LDAP environment:

Acronym	Definition
LDAP	Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
AD	Active Directory. AD is a directory services database implemented by Microsoft, and LDAP is one of the protocols you can use to talk to it.
CN	Common Name, for example "John Doe"
DN	Distinguished Name, for example "cn=John Doe,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com"
SAM-Account-Name	Security Account Manager, logon name for AD, for example "jdoe"
OU	Organizational unit, groups of the server tree
DC	Domain components, root and first branches of the server tree
uid	User identifier