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20061011 Wednesday October 11, 2006

Implementing the AppFuse DAO layer with Spring LDAP This week, I've been helping a click kickstart an application using AppFuse. The first order of business was re-writing the backend to support LDAP. They'd like to keep the Hibernate implementation in place, but they'd also prefer to have the option to use LDAP. Since a database will still be used to manage entities outside of User and Role, the LDAP implementation I have continues to maintain a userId and username in the database.

I'm pretty impressed that I was able to get 90% of the functionality completed in 2 days. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible w/o the excellent Spring LDAP project, nor the good ol' Acegi Security project. I'm deploying on Geronimo using the Apache Directory Plugin for LDAP. Getting a custom UserDetailsService working wasn't too difficult, but I am still having some issues with CRUDing LDAP:

  • I get an Undefined Attribute Type error when modifying the non-String attributes in a User. This is quite strange since all the attributes are stored as Strings in LDAP.
  • I get the same error when trying to remove a user from a role.
  • There's no LdapUnit (like DbUnit) to delete/insert users and roles before running tests. I tried to use the LdapTestServer from Acegi, but no dice.
  • Since the project has two versions (Hibernate or LDAP) in the source tree, the LDAP and Hibernate tests won't both pass. This is because the schema for LDAP only has 2 columns in the app_user table, while the Hibernate version of the table has all columns. The simplest solution seems to be removing the not-null constraints on most of the columns in this table.

If anyone has experience implementing User->Role CRUD in LDAP with Spring LDAP, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these issues. Posted in Java at Oct 11 2006, 09:09:48 AM MDT 11 Comments