The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Thomas Berry <address@concealed>]

Jason,

   The Sympa developers and I had some discussion about this between 
February and May of 2007.  You should be able to find that 
correspondence in the sympa-user or sympa-dev forums.

   Although Sympa readily pulls member data from LDAP "out of the box", 
it is possible to use Sympa's use of the Template::Toolkit Perl module 
to add a supplemental script that can read the LDAP group entry for 
mailing list settings.

   We used this capability to provide our group owners with an 
integrated and simplified web interface to modify list membership and 
basic list settings stored in the LDAP directory group entry.

   I wrote a script to read the settings from the LDAP group and return 
the settings in the config.tt2 format.  A script named 
ldap_group_list.pm was placed into the Template Plugin directory in the 
Perl's module repository that Sympa uses.

Then, the following lines were added to the list family's config.tt2 file:

[% USE ldap_group_list %]
[% listname FILTER $ldap_group_list %]
# Template::Toolkit Plugin for LDAP group based list settings
### end of config.tt2 ###


Here is an example of the custom Template::Toolkit script 
ldap_group_list.pm:

package Template::Plugin::ldap_group_list;

use Template::Plugin::Filter;
use base qw( Template::Plugin::Filter );

my $setting = "";

$setting .= <<"TT2";

send public

visibility noconceal
TT2

return $setting;

1;
### end of ldap_group_list.pm ###



   In our implementation, I made sure the script retrieved and restored 
the mailing list's current config.tt2 settings just in case the LDAP 
directory was unavailable.  This was done using the methods provided by 
Sympa's List module.

   Finally, I made modifications to Sympa so that it would update the 
list configuration and membership from the LDAP group when a new message 
was sent to the list--I understand this functionality will be included 
in a future release of Sympa.

Thomas


Jason Giangrande wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I'm trying to have Sympa use lists that currently only reside as groups in 
> ldap, not in Sympa's database.  These groups contain the list of users who 
> are members of each list.  Now I'm fairly certain that with 
> include_ldap_query and it's sibling include_ldap_2level_query it is possible 
> to query ldap and return a list of subscribers, but as best I can tell this 
> is only possible on a per list basis.  In other words, I'm trying to 
> determine if Sympa currently supports querying ldap and only ldap for all 
> it's list management activity?  Is this possible with Sympa or is the ldap 
> functionality only designed to pull users from lists that already exists in 
> Sympa's internal database?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Jason Giangrande
> System Administrator
> Clark University