Active Directory

Accessing the Active Directory is a pretty common problem in software projects, especially in enterprise-related ones. Although, since it’s usually an “implement once, reuse forever” feature, it’s usually overlooked as well people usually join projects halfway through, when all critical features have long been implemented.

In my case, I had to come up with our own solution to generate LDAP queries when the project I joined halfway through didn’t have the necessary components to query the AD and return results, even though an LDAP-based authentication was a core feature. I personally took over that part and implemented something similar to CodeIgniter’s active record feature, a set of simple classes to generates LDAP queries (search filters, to be exact), run them and parse the results into strongly typed, annotation-based models.

That particular implementation will be the subject of a future article, but in the meantime I’ve decided to share what I’ve gathered through my work. Not much, perhaps, but here it is anyway.