4. Examples

The following are some example LDAP URLs that use the format defined above. The first example is an LDAP URL referring to the University of Michigan entry, available from an LDAP server of the client's choosing:

  ldap:///o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US

The next example is an LDAP URL referring to the University of Michigan entry in a particular ldap server:

  ldap://ldap1.example.net/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US

Both of these URLs correspond to a base object search of the "o=University of Michigan,c=US" entry using a filter of "(objectclass=*)", requesting all attributes.

The next example is an LDAP URL referring to only the postalAddress attribute of the University of Michigan entry:

  ldap://ldap1.example.net/o=University%20of%20Michigan,
         c=US?postalAddress

The corresponding LDAP search operation is the same as in the previous example, except that only the postalAddress attribute is requested.

The next example is an LDAP URL referring to the set of entries found by querying the given LDAP server on port 6666 and doing a subtree search of the University of Michigan for any entry with a common name of "Babs Jensen", retrieving all attributes:

  ldap://ldap1.example.net:6666/o=University%20of%20Michigan,
         c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)

The next example is an LDAP URL referring to all children of the c=GB entry:

  LDAP://ldap1.example.com/c=GB?objectClass?ONE

The objectClass attribute is requested to be returned along with the entries, and the default filter of "(objectclass=*)" is used.

The next example is an LDAP URL to retrieve the mail attribute for the LDAP entry named "o=Question?,c=US", illustrating the use of the percent-encoding mechanism on the reserved character '?'.

  ldap://ldap2.example.com/o=Question%3f,c=US?mail

The next example (which is broken into two lines for readability) illustrates the interaction between the LDAP string representation of the filters-quoting mechanism and the URL-quoting mechanisms.

  ldap://ldap3.example.com/o=Babsco,c=US
          ???(four-octet=%5c00%5c00%5c00%5c04)

The filter in this example uses the LDAP escaping mechanism of \ to encode three zero or null bytes in the value. In LDAP, the filter would be written as (four-octet=\00\00\00\04). Because the
character must be escaped in a URL, the \s are percent-encoded as %5c (or %5C) in the URL encoding.

The next example illustrates the interaction between the LDAP string representation of the DNs-quoting mechanism and URL-quoting mechanisms.

  ldap://ldap.example.com/o=An%20Example%5C2C%20Inc.,c=US

The DN encoded in the above URL is:

  o=An Example\2C Inc.,c=US

That is, the left-most RDN value is:

  An Example, Inc.

The following three URLs are equivalent, assuming that the defaulting rules specified in Section 3 of this document are used:

  ldap://ldap.example.net
  ldap://ldap.example.net/
  ldap://ldap.example.net/?

These three URLs point to the root DSE on the ldap.example.net server.

The final two examples show use of a hypothetical, experimental bind name extension (the value associated with the extension is an LDAP DN).

  ldap:///??sub??e-bindname=cn=Manager%2cdc=example%2cdc=com
  ldap:///??sub??!e-bindname=cn=Manager%2cdc=example%2cdc=com

The two URLs are the same, except that the second one marks the e-bindname extension as critical. Notice the use of the percent- encoding mechanism to encode the commas within the distinguished name value in the e-bindname extension.