Entries, Attributes, and Values

An LDAP directory has entries that contain information pertaining to some entity. Each of the entry’s attributes has a name and one or more values. The names of attributes are most often mnemonic strings, such as cn for common name, or mail for e-mail 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, e-mail 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.