Features¶

HTTP methods supported

LWP::Protocol::ldap implements the HTTP GET and HEAD methods. They are mapped to the LDAP search operation,

Response format

Depending on the HTTP Accept header provided by the user agent, LWP::Protocol::ldap can answer the requests in one of the following formats:

DSML

When the HTTP Accept header contains the "text/dsml" MIME type, the response is sent as DSMLv1.

JSON

When the HTTP Accept header contains the "text/json" MIME type, the response is sent as JSON. For this to work the JSON Perl module needs to be installed.

LDIF

When the HTTP Accept header contains the "text/ldif" MIME type, the response is sent in LDIFv1 format.

HTML

In case no HTTP Accept header has been sent or none of the above MIME types can be detected, and the x-format extension has not been provided either, the response is sent using HTML markup in a 2-column table format (roughly modeled on LDIF).

As an alternative to sending an HTTP Accept header, LWP::Protocol::ldap also accepts the "x-format" extension

Example:

 ldap://ldap.example.com/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)?x-format=dsml

TLS support

For ldap and ldapi URIs, the module implements the "x-tls" extension that switches the LDAP connection to TLS using a call of the start_tls method.

Example:

 ldap://ldap.example.com/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)?x-tls=1

Note: In the above example, ideally giving "x-tls" should be sufficient, but unfortunately the parser in URI::ldap has a little flaw.

Authorization

Usually the connection is done anonymously, but if the HTTP Authorization header is provided with credentials for HTTP Basic authorization, the credentials given in that header will be used to do a simple bind to the LDAP server.