We administer the Greek School Network Directory Service which currently contains more than 170,000 entries including school accounts for email and dialup access, teacher accounts and several student accounts (though this service is just starting). Services include email accounts, dialup access, web pages, VoIP and others. User administration is done through a feature-full web administration interface created by CTI at Patras. This administration interface includes powerful features like:

  • Maintaining referential integrity for configurable attributes
  • Maintaining attribute uniqueness
  • Creating attributes based on the value of other attributes (to be exact any php function or expression may be used when computing attribute values which is even more powerful).
  • Performing post operation tasks like creating user directories, sending welcome emails and so on.

Greek School Network is moving towards the e-school framework which apart from the currently available services includes:

  • A web portal (sPortal) for student parents which allows them to view student data like missed classes and others
  • A school administration platform which will move all school operations (student enrollment, classroom management, grading) to the electronic world.

These new services create new sources of information for the existing Directory Service. Parents will obtain accounts in the web portal while the school administration platform will create student accounts for all the Greek students. Allowing these services to administer these entries through plain LDAP poses some serious drawbacks:

  • Each service only has knowledge of it’s own little world (and attributes). The sPortal for instance just needs to create simple parent username/password for access to the Portal. It is not concerned with the fact that the created account might also be entitled to email or VoIP access.
  • There is no way to perform post operation tasks like creating user directories.
  • Each service is given too much power over the Directory Service. There’s almost no control (apart from ACIs) of what is added to the directory and no constraints can be set on the incoming attribute values (ok you have that ability in latest OpenLDAP releases but you get my point).

The way we decided to overcome the above difficulties was by creating a web service interface around the already excisting user interface. The web service uses WSDL and SOAP over HTTP(S) to create a function interface to all abstract operations needed by the external services. Each time a parent has to be created in sPortal for instance the portal will call the CreateParent() functions with appropriate arguments. This function will perform all the necessary checks on the arguments and call the internal object creation function of the user administration interface. That way:

  • We use the same function backend for both the user administration interface and the web services.
  • Complete and configurable logging of all operations is available with much more detail than that provided in LDAP server logs.
  • Referential integrity and attribute uniqueness is already available in the administration interface backend.
  • Computed attributes values are available using any valid php function or expression for computing values. Something like Class of Service but with much more power and control.
  • Pre and Post operation tasks can be performed through the backend (which can call outside scripts or other web services).
  • All operations pass through a single point where we have complete control over what happens and by whom. We can set constraints on attribute values and do extra checks on these values (for instance we can make sure that an incoming certificate actually belongs to the corresponding user entry).
  • Outside services don’t need to have deep knowledge of our entry scheme. They just need to call already defined functions (with the minimum set of arguments) and the web services/backend handles the rest. We are free to change the entry scheme whenever we want, adding or removing computed and static attributes to the ones sent by the web service.
  • We can impose our own entry expiration policy. The EntryDelete() web service function might end up just setting an active=false attribute inside the entry allowing us to decide when to actually delete the entry and/or perform any other tasks necessary.

Unfortunately, we cannot release the administration interface to the general public. We hope to be able to do that in the near future though since we have to create a web service interface like the one described above for the e-University project. In my opinion things are going to move to the realm of web services as far as writes are concerned. DSML is already available in most LDAP server offerings; creating a web service function interface around the actual LDAP operations is the next step forward in my vision. That is the vision of the XML Enabled Directory Internet draft. Although i believe that just translating LDAP operations to XML is not enough. In our case doing that would:

  • Increase web service development time proportionally
  • Negate some of the basic advantages of the current schema. Clients call abstract functions (ParentCreate(),ParentUpdate()) and don’t need to trouble themselves with the underlying database (LDAP), the semantics of LDAP operations or even the complete entry schema (they only need to provide basic user information, the rest, like creating objectclasses or produced attributes is handled by the underlying function interface).

Providing an inteligent backend/library in order for directory administrators to easily produce an abstract operation web services interface to their existing directory infrastructure for outside services is what i would like to have available in the end.