[Detrius]

Has anyone had any experience working with this framework to interact with (and modify) Open Directory?

I'm wanting to write software to do something that Apple forgot in Workgroup Manager.

[Angus_D]

Yes. It's a horrendous disgusting vomitous piece of <insert expletive of choice>.

What are you trying to do?

[Detrius]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Yes. It's a horrendous disgusting vomitous piece of <insert expletive of choice>.

What are you trying to do?

It's been a while since I've been here in the developer forums, but I have the general Cocoa stuff down. I've recently been working in OS X Server (hence the ACSA certification). Apple has no useful interface for editing the contact information for a person in Open Directory. The fields exist and work if you insert the data one field at a time by hand (I have this much working on my server). I want to write a program to make this significantly easier--so that people don't have to use MS Exchange to do this. Once I have that code down (and I know what the options are), I'm probably also going to make an AddressBook plugin to simplify the process even further.

In a few minutes of searching, I didn't find any other programs out there that do this. I know how to do this by hand at the command line using dscl, but after looking at the NSTask documentation, I figure it may be better to go through the DirectoryService framework. However, your description applies very well even to the documentation.

I was hoping I'd get lucky and find someone that could save me a few days of research with just a few sentences of input.

[Angus_D]

I was under the impression that you could set all of this in Address Book, which I have been told talks DS.

Also look at tools that modify LDAP, since Open Directory in OS X Server is just LDAPv3 with extra crazy Apple schemas and other proprietary evil. Even the LDAP library is probably a better bet than the DS framework.

I kind of have an ongoing project to sanitize the DS API and make it usable/documented, but it's kind of not very interesting.

[Detrius]

Address Book reads from DirectoryService, but it won't write to it. If it will, I haven't figured out how. I have the DirectoryService portion of AddressBook working with my OpenDirectory server, but the way to make this work would be out of the question for any group with more than a few people. Therefore, it seems to me that it's effectively useless without a nice UI written on top of it.