5 Directory Cache

This chapter discusses Directory Cache, a component of Oracle Mail that, when enabled, builds an in-memory cached copy of the corporate directory, enabling faster lookup of user information when using the Oracle WebMail client.

Additionally, when Directory Cache is enabled, auto-complete and address resolution features associated with Directory Cache are enabled.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• About Directory Cache

• Enabling Directory Cache

About Directory Cache

Directory Provider provides data access to the corporate directory (Oracle Internet Directory). It creates a directory cache upon startup, and allows direct connection to LDAP. While Directory Cache is being built, or if Directory Cache is disabled, it is said to be in pass-through mode.

Once the building of Directory Cache is complete, performance improves dramatically. The cache refreshes itself periodically, every 24 hours by default.

This section discusses the following topics:

• Directory Cache Search Behavior

• Directory Cache Default Behavior

• Location of Directory Cache Logs

Directory Cache Search Behavior

The search behavior varies depending upon whether Directory Cache is enabled or not. Directory Cache is a crawler, and will span fields. However, during pass-through, queries work only on single fields.

For example, if the following searches are performed for a user that exists in Directory Cache, such as Andrew Edwards [e-mail], the following results are returned:

• Search for andre will return Andrew Edwards from both the pass-through and the cache.

• Search for andrew e will return Andrew Edwards from the cache but will not return Andrew Edwards from the pass-through.

When searching in pass-through mode, the following attributes are used:

cn
telephonenumber
main
givenname
sn
middlename

The following attributes are indexed, for searching, in the cache:

givenname
sn
middlename
displayName
mail
dn

Directory Cache Default Behavior

Directory Cache refreshes itself periodically, every 24 hours by default.

During cache update, every query is retried three times when there are failures (with a one minute sleep). If the third query fails, errors are logged and the cache update is aborted until the next time.

Location of Directory Cache Logs

Directory Cache logs are contained in the container's log file, located in the $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs/ directory.

Logs are set to INFO by default in Oracle WebMail. To get more detailed log messages, raise the log level in the oc4j.properties file for the Oracle WebMail client.

See Also: "Oracle WebMail Client Log Files Location" for more information about setting log levels in Oracle WebMail

Enabling Directory Cache

To enable Directory Cache, set the following parameter in the $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_OCSClient/config/oc4j.properties file:

# to enable Directory Cache
oracle.ocsclient.directory.cache.enable=true

In addition, the following parameter specifies how often Directory Cache refreshes its in-memory copy with the data from the live Oracle Internet Directory:

# how often the directory cache updates, in hours
oracle.ocsclient.directory.updateinterval=24