Re: [21.2] LDAP add and delete functions + interrupt fixes

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: > >>>>> "-BP" == William M Perry <wmperry(a)aventail.com&gt; writes: > > -BP> To merge the LDAP code, you would have to do a major overhaul > -BP> of the existing database code, and I'm not sure you would be > -BP> able to get the full power of LDAP without making the > -BP> 'normal' databases pretty difficult to use. > > OK, that's why it might be hard. It still sounds like it's a good > idea to me. Perhaps, but I think that the code to do anything ldap-ish would still look very ldap-ish as opposed to abstract-database-ish. Another big problem with LDAP vs. the other database types is the ability to have multiple values off of a single attribute, and each 'key' in the database can have multiple attributes. In LDAP you have: uid=wmperry,ou=aventail.com,c=us -> cn = William M. Perry Bill Perry Emacs Dork mail = wmperry(a)aventail.com The older database backends would require you to do: You could theoretically do: - extend open-database to take a plist, but this breaks all (any?) existing code. LDAP would be a generic instance with (open-database '(:host "ldap.in.aventail.com" :type ldap :subtype 3 :bind-username "something" :bind-password "somethingelse" :base "o=aventail.com, c=us")) - extend get-database to be able to return multiple hits for a key. (get-database KEY ATTRIBUTE DATABASE) Documentation: Return value(s) for ATTRIBUTE on object KEY in DATABASE. An assoc list is returned, the car of each entry in the list the attribute name. The cdr is a list of values for that attribute. If there is no corresponding value, return nil. If ATTRIBUTE is t, returns all attributes and values. (get-database "uid=wmperry, o=aventail.com, c=us" "mail" dbhandle) => '(("mail" &quot;wmperry(a)aventail.com&quot;)) (get-database "uid=wmperry, o=aventail.com, c=us" "cn" dbhandle) => '(("mail" &quot;wmperry(a)aventail.com&quot;) ("cn" "William M. Perry" "Bill Perry" "Emacs Dork")) - extend put-database to be able to set multiple hits for a key, and submit multiple changes at once. (put-database KEY VALUES DATABASE &optional replace) Documentation: Updated record KEY in DATABASE with new VALUES. VALUES is an assoc list of attribute/value pairs. Some databases support multiple values. If optional fourth arg REPLACE is non-nil, replace any existing entry in the database. This whole doc string needs better updates. :) (put-database "uid=wmperry, o=aventail.com, c=us" '("cn" "Willie Perry") dbhandle nil) => t Would _add_ a CN to the record, so we'd now look like: uid=wmperry,ou=aventail.com,c=us -> cn = William M. Perry Bill Perry Emacs Dork Willie Perry mail = wmperry(a)aventail.com - New function search-database (search-database DATABASE CRITERIA) Documentation: Search DATABASE for records matching CRITERIA. CRITERIA is a property list. It is up to the backend database to convert this to native representation. Maybe we could have something for this that looks more lispish than an LDAP request. I'm not sure how a berkeley db database would implement this. For LDAP, we could have something like: (search-database dbhandle '(& (| ("cn" "William M. Perry" "Bill Perry")) ("mail" &quot;wmperry(a)aventail.com&quot;))) The ldap backend would convert this into: "(& (| (cn=William M. Perry") (cn="Bill Perry")) (mail=wmperry(a)aventail.com&quot;))&quot; And pass that off to ldap_search() - map-database would have to be revamped to return new values, etc. It would be nice if you could register new database backends at runtime, even for lisp functions. Then you could write an SQL backend in lisp using <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/pg.el>;. That could be done by having a generic 'elisp' backend in database.c, and be able to do something like: (define-database TYPE FUNCPLIST) Where the entries in FUNCPLIST would be the generic name 'open' 'close' 'search' etc would be the key, and the value would be the actual lisp function to call to do the searching. That's all just off the top of my head, but it might work. :) -Bill P.