ldap_sort

(PHP 4 >= 4.2.0, PHP 5, PHP 7)

ldap_sort — Sort LDAP result entries on the client side

Warning

This function has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 7.0.0 and REMOVED as of PHP 8.0.0. Relying on this function is highly discouraged.

Description

ldap_sort(resource $link, resource $result, string $sortfilter): bool

Sort the result of a LDAP search, returned by ldap_search().

As this function sorts the returned values on the client side it is possible that you might not get the expected results in case you reach the sizelimit either of the server or defined within ldap_search().

Parameters

link: An LDAP resource, returned by ldap_connect().
result: An search result identifier, returned by ldap_search().
sortfilter: The attribute to use as a key in the sort.

Return Values

No value is returned.

Changelog

Version	Description
8.0.0	This function has been removed.

Examples

Sorting the result of a search.

Example #1 LDAP sort

<?php
     // $ds is a valid link identifier (see ldap_connect)

     $dn        = 'ou=example,dc=org';
     $filter    = '(|(sn=Doe*)(givenname=John*))';
     $justthese = array('ou', 'sn', 'givenname', 'mail');

     $sr = ldap_search($ds, $dn, $filter, $justthese);

     // Sort
     ldap_sort($ds, $sr, 'sn');

     // Retrieving the data
     $info = ldap_get_entries($ds, $sr);

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User Contributed Notes 6 notes

down

zbaizman at yahoo dot com ¶

20 years ago

This note may be self-evident, but the functionality of ldap_sort threw off this sometime user of relational databases.

The following code will NOT do what you expect:

<?php

// omitted calls to connect and and bind to LDAP server...

// attributes we want to retrieve from LDAP server
$ldap_attributes = array ( 'cn', 'o', 'mail' ) ;

// retrieve attributes from matching entries
$search_results = ldap_search ( $ldap_conn, 'dc=example,dc=org', '(objectclass=*)', 0, 500, 30 ) ;

// sort entries by last name ('sn')
ldap_sort ( $ldap_conn, $search_results, 'sn' ) ;

?>

The entries will NOT be sorted by last name. Why not? Because LDAP doesn't function like a RDBMS; you cannot sort a result set on an arbitrary field, regardless of whether you "selected" it. You must always include the attribute by which you want to sort your entries among the requested attributes (add 'sn' to $ldap_attributes, in this case).

Hope this is helpful to some other folks who scratched their heads when they tried to sort entries and it didn't work out...

down

thorben at kapp-hamburg dot de ¶

13 years ago

I wondered how to sort after a dn, for just show a tree view. I tried to set $sortfilter = 'dn', but that didn't work. Than I tried with a blank string ''. That worked, the entries are sorted by dn.

down

ben at xsusio dot com ¶

20 years ago

If you are wanting to sort by multiple attributes, for instance ordering by last name and then first name,  try this function. This is similar to "ORDER BY lastname, firstname"  in SQL.

This function uses an insertion sort algorithm, which is somewhat faster then the old-fashoned bubble sort.  The second argument is an array containing the attributes you want to sort by. (this functon won't do descending or ascending..  feel free to add it!)

<?php
/**
 * @param array $entries
 * @param array $attribs
 * @desc Sort LDAP result entries by multiple attributes.
*/
function ldap_multi_sort(&$entries, $attribs){
    for ($i=1; $i<$entries['count']; $i++){
        $index = $entries[$i];
        $j=$i;
        do {
            //create comparison variables from attributes:
            $a = $b = null;
            foreach($attribs as $attrib){
                $a .= $entries[$j-1][$attrib][0];
                $b .= $index[$attrib][0];
            }
            // do the comparison
            if ($a > $b){
                $is_greater = true;
                $entries[$j] = $entries[$j-1];
                $j = $j-1;
            }else{
                $is_greater = false;
            }
        } while ($j>0 && $is_greater);
        
        $entries[$j] = $index;
    }
    return $entries;
}
?>

down

askgopal at sify dot com ¶

21 years ago

Here's a simple LDAP sort function I wrote:



<?php

function sort_ldap_entries($e, $fld, $order)

{

    for ($i = 0; $i < $e['count']; $i++) {

        for ($j = $i; $j < $e['count']; $j++) {

            $d = strcasecmp($e[$i][$fld][0], $e[$j][$fld][0]);

            switch ($order) {

            case 'A':

                if ($d > 0)

                    swap($e, $i, $j);

                break;

            case 'D':

                if ($d < 0)

                    swap($e, $i, $j);

                break;

            }

        }

    }

    return ($e);

}



function swap(&$ary, $i, $j)

{

    $temp = $ary[$i];

    $ary[$i] = $ary[$j];

    $ary[$j] = $temp;

}

?>



so that it can be invoked like:



<?php

    $entries = sort_ldap_entries($entries, 'mail', 'A'); // sort entries by ascending order of mail

?>



where,

    `$entries' is the array returned by ldap_get_entries() function.



This might be useful to those who still run older versions of PHP (<= 4.2.0) on their web servers :-)

down

matthew dot j dot gray at uwrf dot edu ¶

22 years ago

This function applies strcmp() to each attribute (given by sortfilter) in order to sort the entries returned by the server.  To order search results ascending by last name, try passing "sn" as the sortfilter argument.  This function does not play nice with multi-valued attributes.

down

jason dot sokolowski at rotork dot com ¶

22 years ago

Something real simple i wrote to sort directory searches by a persons last name.



<?php

for($i=0;$i<$result["count"];$i++)

{



$lastname = $result[$i]["sn"][0];



$lnames["$i"]=$lastname;



}//for i



@asort($lnames);

?>

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