Entries, Attributes and Values

An LDAP directory has entries that contain information pertaining to entities. Each attribute has a name and one or more values. The names of the attributes are mnemonic strings, such as cn for common name, or mail for email address.

For example, a company may have an employee directory. Each entry in the employee directory represents an employee. The employee entry contains such information as the name, email address, and phone number, as shown in the following example:

cn: John Doe

mail: johndoe@sun.com

mail: jdoe@stc.com

telephoneNumber: 471-6000 x.1234

Each part of the descriptive information, such as an employee's name, is known as an attribute. In the example above, the Common Name (cn) attribute, represents the name of the employee. The other attributes are mail and telephoneNumber.

Each attribute can have one or more values. For example, an employee entry may contain a mail attribute whose values are johndoe@sun.com and jdoe@stc.com. In the previous example, the mail attribute contains two mail values.