Once the LDAP Address Book is fully configured, the contact
data in the Address Book is automatically pulled from the LDAP directory.
The LDAP Address Book looks virtually the same as a FootPrints
Address Book. LDAP Address Book data is not stored in a FootPrints
Address Book table; it is always taken directly from the LDAP directory.
However, the contact data for a particular customer, when chosen using
the Select
Contact button on the Create
Issue or Edit
Issue pages, will be saved along with the history of the Issue.
The contact data saved in an Issue is a snapshot of the
data taken from the LDAP database at the time the Select
Contact was performed. If the customer’s data changes at
a later date (e.g., the customer's phone number changes), it is not reflected
in the history of the Issue. It will be reflected the next time
that contact data is accessed from the LDAP directory.
Limitations of LDAP Address Book
Using an LDAP directory, once properly configured, is
no different than using a FootPrints Address Book, with the following
exceptions:
FootPrints
permits only read access to an LDAP directory. Write access is not
available in the current release.
If a server limit
is set on the number of contacts to be returned for an LDAP query and
one is attempting to look at any query that would return a number of results
greater than the server limit, some of the results are missing and the
missing results may be randomly dispersed throughout. This most
commonly appears when browsing through the entire Address Book.
Any more specific search for a contact work correctly even if the contact
does not appear when browsing the Address Book. To
correct this problem, the number of results returned for an LDAP query
can be raised on the LDAP server (Active Directory, Sun ONE Directory Server,
etc.)
The Address Book
Homepage and the Select
Contact page do not allow browsing using A-Z links. In
addition, the Address Book Homepage does not list the first fifty contacts
in the Address Book; instead, it displays the Address Book search.
Because LDAP does not support browsing of contacts, and many users have
large LDAP Address Books with various response times, the browsing options
were removed from the interface to prevent time-outs. To find a
contact, fill in one or more fields and click GO.
The non-LDAP
FootPrints Address Book is not
affected.