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:
telephoneNumber: 471-6000 x.1234
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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 might contain a mail attribute
whose values are johndoe@sun.com and jdoe@stc.com. In the example above, the mail attribute contains two
mail values.