crud-operation-examples.rst

The CRUD Operations

This section will make use of the Person class we defined in the previous section.

Create

person = Person(
   uid='cnorris',
   uidnumber=1337,
   firstname='Chuck',
   lastname='Norris',
   email_addresses=[
       'chuck@example.com',
       'cnorris@megacorp.com',
   ],
)

We've now created a person, but not yet saved it. We can check if the object ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.exists or has been saved:

>>> person.exists()
False

This will query the ldap and look to see if there is something with the DN of this object present.

Let's go and save our person.

>>> person.save()
>>> person.exists()
True

Read

Tomorrow we come back and want to look up Chuck Norris's LDAP entry. First we will need to fetch him.

>>> chuck = Person.fetch('cnorris')
>>> print(chuck)
DN: uid=cnorris,ou=people,dc=umiacs,dc=umd,dc=edu
            uid: cnorris
      firstname: Chuck
       lastname: Norris 
      uidnumber: 1337
email_addresses: chuck@example.com
email_addresses: cnorris@megacorp.com

If we wanted to get all of our people, we can use ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.list.

>>> people = Person.list()
>>> people
[uid=liam,ou=people,dc=umiacs,dc=umd,dc=edu,
 uid=cnorris,ou=people,dc=umiacs,dc=umd,dc=edu]

Notice that the __repr__ is set to use the DN of the object.

Update

In order to make updates to the LDAP, we will need to authenticate.

>>> conn = Connection.connect()
Enter a LDAP loginDN or username: liam
Password for LDAP (liam):
>>> Connection.set_connection(conn)

Note

An object will use the connection object that was set at the time that it was instantiated. Subsequent changes to the set, static connection will not affect the connection being used by existing objects.

>>> chuck = Person.fetch('cnorris')
>>> chuck.firstname = 'Carlos'

The careful and the paranoid can see what has changed. LDAP modifications only send modification requests for the attributes that have changed.

>>> chuck.diff()
{'firstname': ('Chuck', 'Carlos')}

Let's ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.save our changes.

>>> chuck.save()

~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.save calls the Person's ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.validate method before doing anything else. ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode has a default implementation that just returns True. We can override validate() and get fancy with what it means for an object to be valid.

Destroy

All of that brings us to the final operation: destruction.

We can destroy our person by calling ~ldapper.ldapnode.LDAPNode.delete.

>>> chuck.delete()
>>> chuck.exists()
False