Defining Business Objects that Use Data from LDAP Server /Active Directory

To get business objects to use data stored in a LDAP server (or LDAP-compliant Windows Active Directory) you need to select the “LDAP” option in the “Persistence” drop-down on the business object property editor (see Specifying General Properties). Then you need to provide the following details.

First of all you need to select a particular LDAP server that you want to connect to. If there are no LDAP servers yet you need to create one by clicking on the Add button next to the “LDAP Server” drop down. The details of this process are described later in this section.

After you select the LDAP server you need to specify the LDAP distinguished name of a sample record in the LDAP server. The record must represent the data type that you want to create a business object for. For example, if you want to use data for users stored in your LDAP server you need to specify a distinguished name of any user stored in the LDAP server (such as uid=kurt,ou=People,dc=openldap,dc=org). Enter the distinguished name and click on the “Discover Attributes” button. At this point AwareIM will automatically discover data definitions stored in LDAP and convert them into the corresponding attributes. The results will be displayed in the “Attributes” table.

To speed up searches for the object you can also specify the distinguished name of the node under which all the data for the object resides in an LDAP server (if such a node exists). If you do not specify anything the entire LDAP tree will be searched.

Once you click OK the discovered attributes will appear in the list of business object attributes. You can now use the business object in the usual way – define queries on the object, business rules, processes etc.

To define a new “LDAP server” click on the Add button on the “LDAP Settings” dialog. This will bring up the “LDAP Server” dialog. First you need to specify the unique name of your LDAP server. Then you need to specify the credentials of your LDAP account (if you leave the values blank, an anonymous account will be used, provided that your LDAP server allows that). Then you need to specify the network name of your LDAP server and the port where it is listening to the requests.

<callout type=“primary” icon=“true” title=“note”> If you want to support secure connections to LDAP servers (LDAPS) add the following entry to the file AwareIM/bin/BASServer.props
LDAP_SECURE_CONNECTION=true</callout>

At the moment the setting applies to all LDAP servers

You will then need to add a certificate of the corresponding LDAP server to the list of trusted certificates of the Java Virtual Machine used by AwareIM and located in the AwareIM/JDK directory using Java keytool utility. Please refer to the documentation of the keytool utility https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/12/tools/keytool.html