Invalid LDAP Column Name Characters

November 6, 2001

If your LDAP server contains column names with invalid characters (a hyphen, for example), will automatically convert them to underscores (the _ character). Although this means that the column names in your application may not match the ones on the server, this is intentional and designed so that your ColdFusion application will be able to access the data. (Applies to: ColdFusion 5)

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Michael Bennett January 5, 2006

CFLDAP in Cold Fusion 7 does not work as advertised with respect to the underscore. Code written for CF5 will not work when run under CF7. Attributes which contain hypens as a result of their being added to Active Directory via schema extension in accordance with the recommended Microsoft naming practice (Company-attributeName) cannot be accessed. Cold Fusion declares the variable has not been defined. The Cold Fusion documentation for version 7 reiterates that it will handle invalid characters the same as previous versions. http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=ColdFusion_Documentation&file=part_cfm.htm Characters that are illegal in ColdFusion can be used in LDAP attribute names. As a result, the cfldap tag could create columns in the query result set whose names contain illegal characters and are, therefore, inaccessible in CFML. In ColdFusion, illegal characters are automatically mapped to the underscore character; therefore, column names in the query result set might not exactly match the names of the LDAP attributes. I have tried using CFWDDX as a work around without success. If anyone has a solution so the existing application can be run under CF 7 please advise!

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