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LDIFDE Format

Hi,
I am writing a program that exports data from Active Directory that will save the data in LDIFDE format. The problem I an having is some times using LDIFDE it knows to encode the field in Base64 eg info:: . However it only seems to do it under certain circumstances. So what are the conditions (rules) which goven when this will and won't happed so I don't create invalid data when I export. (So at the moment sometimes I put invalid characters in there and don't know I should of encoded the field).

Hope this makes sense hard to explain :)

Thanks,

Ward

PFoeckeler

Hi Ward,

LDIFDE always uses the base64 encoding when

- there are binary data to be exported, for example in the attribute "objectGUID" or "objectSID"
- a string attribute has to be exported which contains a non-7-bit-ASCII character.

So if you have "info", "displayname" or even "DN" with "ä", "ö", "ü" and so on, LDIFDE will encode these data to base64, the line is always marked with a double "::"

So to be exact, you should always encode to base64 if you have some kind of special characters (ASCII code <32 or >127) in a string. This is done by converting first the string to UTF-8, then encode it to base64. In .NET Visual BAsic you would to this:

Public Function string_to_base64(ByVal s As String) As String
Dim bytes As Byte() = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s)
string_to_base64 = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes)
End Function

By the way: This is what LDIFDE does, and what te LDIF specification in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2849 demands. But an Active Directory domain controller under 2003 and newer also can handle LDIF files for directory imports where special characters are NOT encoded into base64 - the LDIF file just have to be saved as UTF-8 text!! :)

Philipp

whorsfall

ASKER

Hi,

Thanks for your response. However based on what you have
said I have found the following

See the comments next to the hash sign I have written.
A ":" will Base64 encode (ASCII 58) does encode but
"a:b" does not. The colon characte falls within the
normal ASCII range..

# PC4 - Users and Computers - Description: : (A single colon)

dn: CN=PC4,OU=TestOU,DC=acme,DC=net
changetype: add
description:: Og==
name: PC4
sAMAccountName: PC4$

# PC3 - Users and Computers - Description a:b
# So why does PC4 encode to Base64 and this field does not
# as it contains a colon?

dn: CN=PC3,OU=TestOU,DC=acme,DC=net
changetype: add
description: a:b
name: PC3
sAMAccountName: PC3$

Thanks,

Ward.

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PFoeckeler

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whorsfall

ASKER

Hi,

Thanks for your response no problems.

I actually found this article which I believe will give me some more clues:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2849.txt

Thanks,
Ward