LINQ to LDAP: Event Listeners

I'm adding support for listening to Add, Update, and Delete operations in the latest version of LINQ to LDAP. This will allow you to perform validation or logging operations before anything is executed. So let's try this out:



There are 3 interfaces that you can implement to subscribe to events: IPreAddEventListener, IPreDeleteEventListener, IPreUpdateEventListener. Each interface has a Notify method that will give you access to the entry being modified (the mapped object, the DirectoryAttributes, or the Distinguished Name in the case of Delete), the LdapConnection used for the modification, and the DirectoryRequest that will be sent. The DirectoryRequest won't have any of the attribute values added since you may want to do validation beforehand. You can also add / modify anything you want about the request.

Using your event listener is pretty straightforward:



When using the LdapConfiguration you can call RegisterListener and it will be used across all DirectoryContexts. When using the LdapConnection extension methods you can pass it in as a parameter. And that's about it.

LINQ to LDAP: Attribute Scoped Queries

Active Directory has supported this feature since Windows Server 2003, however I only learned about it recently from Simon Garratt. An attribute scoped query allows you to search within any multivalued attribute of an entry. This becomes really useful when you want to search for users within a group without performing multiple queries.

Say you want to find all users in the sales department for a group:



So what's going on here? I'm looking for User objects stored in "CN=Group,DC=server,DC=com" and I'm using a base search scope since I'm looking within a specific distinguished name.

On the second line I call ScopeToAttribute and I give it the name of the attribute on the group (member in this case). On a side note, ScopeToAtribute is just some syntactic sugar for calling WithControls and passing in a AsqRequestControl.

On the third line I'm just creating a standard filter. Since I'm querying for users my filter will be in that context. I can search on any User property and create any projection from a User.

I think this is pretty cool since it goes for any multivalued attribute that links to other directory entries (members, groups, employees, etc.).