Schema Extension for Location Class

NAMING CONVENTIONS

Rather than having attributes scattered across the alphabetical list, not knowing who created what attribute or class; I use the naming convention BRANDT:attributename(or classname) This way all of your attributes and classes are together and everyone know who created them. (Trust me, this might seem silly at first, but after you create/delete/create a few classes you will thank me.)

1. Within iManager | Roles and Tasks | Schema | Create Attribute I created three different attributes called:

With the Syntax of "Case Ignore String" And Attribute Flags "Single Valued" ("Sting" is chosen by default based on the Syntax)

1. Within iManager | Roles and Tasks | Schema | Create Class I created the Aux Class

I do not choose any Parent Inheritance Class I chose the following Mandatory Attributes:

• BRANDT:Latitude
• BRANDT:Longitude
• OU (named)

I chose the following Optional Attributes:

• Description
• BRANDT:Altitude (since it will almost always be Zero)
• Postal Address

1. Within iManager | Roles and Tasks | Schema | Object Extensions I selected the Organizational Unit I want to assign a Location

(:title Schema Extension for Location Class :)

One of my clients has a intranet site which ties together different databases. Problem is that all of these databases are based on MSAccess and they don't work well together.

One of the databases was a phone book of all the staff. My first task was to migrate this to eDirectory and use LDAP to recover the information for the Website. (Essentially using eDirectory as the back-end database) This was fairly straightforward as eDirectory is primarily used for user information.

The next problem I wanted to tackle was the site database. Their eDirectory layout was based on a Geographical structure. So each site (and there were plenty of them) each had an Organizational Unit (OU). I wanted to extend the schema so that I could record the Longitude and Latitude as attributes of the OU. This way we could just perform a basic LDAP search for a site, retrieve the LAT and LONG, feed them into Google Maps (or something) and volá.

The next problem was how to do this, there was nothing already existing in eDirectory that I could use for LAT and LONG. I didn't want to use other Attributes since that would seem to be unprofessional and sloppy. I could just create new Attributes and associate them with the OU class, but I have run into problems with that before. After a good deal of research I found a few references that suggested it is best to create custom attributes, add those attributes to a custom Auxiliary Class, and then associate that Aux Class with the specific object. It is a little more time consuming, but if you ever need to delete the attributes and/or class it is much cleaner!

1. First you will need to create the Attributes. I created three different attributes called:

BRANDT:Longitude BRANDT:Latitude BRANDT:Altitude

1. Next you need to create the Aux Class.

BRANDT:Location