New LDAP Library!

[eluser]targee[/eluser]
I am somewhat reluctant to make a post to this forum since I am a CI baby newbee, but I have been using ldap authentication for a number of years within a PHP environment I wrote myself. My approach was somewhat different than I understand what is presented here. We are using a postgres db which we have setup with direct ldap authentication not password authentication. After we did that I setup a very basic user group called stdusr_group where all my users are members.

When my users login with their user name and password I check their authority in a two stage process. First I attempt to connect to the a user database using their user name and emcrypted pasword. After I have set the error_reporting to 0 allowing me to catch errors myself. If an error is thrown while attempting to connection I present the standard unable to login message. If they pass the connection phase I compare their user name and encrypted password with those on the user database/user table. If they have passed both tests I carry their user information and authorized boolean value an a session database/session table using the session_id as the primary key. Them I allow them the most basic of access in my application and tables using group rights. I have my menus generated per user rights etc on their home page.

One reason I used this approach I wanted to maintain user db rights through database rights groups and I wanted to use database triggers one for each table to keep a copy of the record before any changes were made and to use the current user function making those changes. I also have three additional fields in my history tables mod_user, mod_datetime and mod_action (C,U,D.). I found the postgres code triggers a easy and seamless way to monitor and maintain database activity.

Using this approach I didn't require a php classes to communicate with the ldap server but have the database server do the dirty work.

If I am posting the wrong information to the wrong forum I apologize but I just thought I would share my experiences and techniques so someone could benefit from them. Feel free to identify the weaknesses my design and approach as I am here to learn.