[Zope3-dev] Re: LDAP Authentication source

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Nicolas Évrard wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently continuing my journey in zope3 and I stumble accross the
> NewPrincipalSource recipe. So instead of copying it verbatim, I tried to
> do a ldap version of this one.

Great! If you think you are ready to share your work, consider 
contributing it to the z3 base project, http://codespeak.net/z3/

> I'm now thinking about extending this little product. Adding caching,
> and maybe a specialized principal for ldap.
> 
> But I wonder, is it really usefull to add such a specialized principal ?
> Because in a certain sense this kind of code seems neat:
> 
>    >>> foo = source.getPrincipal('foo')
>    >>> print foo.sn
>    'Fee Fi Fo fun for me'
> 
> But this king of information is not related to security and might
> (should ?) take place somewhere else.

Indeed, the interface that describes principals, IPrincipal, is only 
about security-related information. A good way would probably to have an 
extra interface, e.g. ILDAPNode, and adapt principals to it:

   >>> foo = source.getPrincipal('foo')
   >>> ldap = ILDAPNode(foo)
   >>> print ldap.sn
   Fee Fi Fo fun for me

The underlying implementation could actually do:

   class LDAPPrincipal(object):
       implements(IPrincipal, ILDAPNode)

       ...

If an object is adapted to an interface it already provides, the object 
itself is returned...

Philipp