Starting Container for Directory Operations

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The Profiling System provides three attributes for defining the starting search container:

  • ParentDN
  • DefaultParentURL
  • Parent URL

These attributes are arranged in a hierarchy that determines the precedence for searching. The following three topics are arranged according to this hierarchy.

ParentDN

The ParentDN property is optionally added to the profile definition to specify the distinguished name (DN) of the starting search container. If used, this property allows the container to be specified for an individual profile and overrides the settings for the DefaultParentURL and Parent URL attributes. Specifying this attribute provides the most detailed level of control.

DefaultParentURL

The DefaultParentURL attribute is added as a custom attribute to the profile definition, as shown in the following figure. The value of this attribute is relative to the defaultNamingContext custom attribute specified for the data source. This value is used as the starting search container for all profiles (of this definition type) that do not have a different value specified in a ParentDN property. This attribute overrides the Parent URL attribute.

The following figure shows the DefaultParentURL attribute being added to the UserObject profile.

ParentDefaultURL attribute being added to UserObject profile.

Parent URL

You can configure the Parent URL attribute on the System Attributes tab in the Properties dialog box for the LDAP data source that is using the Profiles resource of Commerce Server Manager. The value of this attribute is the distinguished name (DN) of the starting search container.

As an example, assume that existing accounts are stored in CN=Users,DC=testDomain,DC=com. One way to direct the Profiling System to read accounts from this container is to set the Parent URL attribute of the Active Directory data source to CN=Users,DC=testDomain,DC=com. The Profiling System will perform all subsequent directory operations against this container unless overridden by the DefaultParentURL attribute or the ParentDN property.

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