Once again, after discovering very little information from Microsoft about Active Directory over LDAP I was posed with a question on the adLDAP forums https://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=104193

And that was how to handle accented characters over LDAP. Running a standard ldap_modify() will cause a ‘Constraint violation’ error from the domain controller.

I finally discovered, after reading the RFC for LDAP that I need to encode the ‘offending’ characters as UTF-8.

I could have simply executed

$adldap->user_modify('AD.UserName', array('firstname'=>utf8_encode('Göran'));

but that would be too easy wouldn’t it. Seeing as my believe with libraries should be, you shouldn’t have to think about this, let us allow the library to do this work for us.

Whenever you modify or create attributes in adLDAP it passes the attributes array through a schema function so let’s process the array detecting 8 bit characters

array_walk($attributes, array($this, 'encode8bit'));

Then let us create the function encode8bit

protected function encode8bit(&$item, $key) {
        $encode = false;
        if (is_string($item) === true) {
            for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($item); $i++)
            {
                // Detect the ordinal value of the character
                if (ord($item[$i]) >> 7) {
                    $encode = true;
                }

            }
        }
        if ($encode === true) {
            $item = utf8_encode($item);
        }
    }   

Update WordPress was messing with the rendering of this function, I’ve now corrected it.

I’ve committed the code to the repository trunk and it’s now available to download directly from SVN

Well since joining the adLDAP project on SourceForge, I’ve just published version 3.0.

Version 3.0 is a big change from 2.0, firstly I’ve removed support for PHP 4, by using proper PHP 5 constructors and making variables / functions public and protected.

I’ve added a number of new functions for Exchange mailbox creation, contact management and user deletion (as well as PHP Doc style commenting the code).

I’ve also gone and re-organised much of the documentation on the Wiki.

Go check it out for yourself http://adldap.sourceforge.net

Update: I’m now part of the original adLDAP project, so libAD has been withdrawn, look forward to seeing my contributions and Exchange supposed on adLDAP in the near future.

A while ago I started using a library called adLDAP, unfortunately there have been a number of bugs and lack of some features with it.  Couple this with the lack of updates for the past two years, I decided to re-work this library and release it myself.  This library is called libAD.

libAD is a PHP library providing Active Directory authentication and management over LDAP.

It provides intelligent Active Directory integration with PHP. This extends on the original project that has not been updated for some time. It’s aim is to help other developers with getting over the same hurdles that we’ve experienced in getting the whole LDAP SSL Active Directory puzzle working natively on Linux.

This library is not designed to be a complete Active Directory management systems, but give you a set of functions through an API that will allow you to interface successfully with your Active Directory.

Given the varied nature of organisations and sites, adLDAP may not be your complete solution, but it should be a very sound starting point. LDAP isn’t overly friendly on first glance, and it’s a steep learning curve made alot worse when coupled with Microsoft’s seemingly unending army of catches.

The information you can retrieve from Active Directory is as useful as you make it. If you don’t fill out all their account information there’s not really going to be much to query.

libAD is open source software and is released under the GNU General Public License v2. This is a change from the license used under adLDAP which was LGPL.

Update: I’m now part of the original adLDAP project, so libAD has been withdrawn, look forward to seeing my contributions and Exchange supposed on adLDAP in the near future.