Administration Guide › Set Up Views › Ways to Use Views

Ways to Use Views

This section goes through a number of real-world examples and explains how views can be harnessed to meet these requirements.

Using Views for Data Normalization (Class of Service)

Views can be useful if your directory contains highly repetitive information. For example, each user entry contains office location and contact details which are identical for many users. This uses a lot of space for caching and backups and is complex to update.

To solve this, use views in the following way:

1. Create a separate subtree to hold office information including a unique office identifier in each entry.
2. Replace the repetitive office information with the related office identifier in each user entry.
3. Create a view so that an entry being returned will also perform a lookup of the office details and include them in the user entry.

Using Views for User Preferences

If your directory has one-to-many subordinate entries that each contains various preference information, you could use a view to perform a single search returning the entry you are interested in, and all its subordinates.

To do this, create a view that retrieves a target entry.

The result of this search (base-object of entry returned) can then be used to perform a one-level/subtree search to return the entry's subordinates.

Using Views to Restrict Access

A view can remove values before it returns the result. This can be useful for restricting access.

For example, a pay TV customer that has subscribed to a package that includes adult content, wishes to have adult content disallowed as they have small children.

A view can be created to retrieve the services for a particular package a user has subscribed to.

The next phase of the view can retrieve restricted items that can then be pruned from the values/objects retrieved above.

Using Views to Overlay Another Directory

An overlay directory lets you augment entries in a another directory with extra attributes. This lets you use CA Directory to extend the schema of an existing less-flexible directory.

Views can be used to achieve this by storing entries in another directory instance that share unique values with the other directory. A view can be created to retrieve the two linked entries and merge the result into a single entry.