Figure 4-11 A combined DIT using views

The DIT Figure 4-11 “A combined DIT using views” in illustrates what happens when the two DITs shown in Figure 4-10 “Examples of a flat and an organizationally-based DIT” are combined using views. Because views inherently allow entries to appear in more than one place in a view hierarchy, this feature has been used to expand the ou=Sales entry to enable viewing the Sales entries either by location or by product.

Given a set of virtual DIT view hierarchies, a directory user can use the view that makes the most sense to navigate to the required entries. For example, if the target entries were those who live in Mountain View, a view which begins by navigating using location-based information is most appropriate. If it were an organizational question, the organization view would be a better choice. Both of these views exist in the Directory Server at the same time and operate on the same entries; the different views just have different objectives when displaying their version of the directory structure.

The entries in the views-enabled directory in Figure 4-11 “A combined DIT using views” are contained in a flat namespace just below the parent of the top-most view in the hierarchy. This is not required. The entries can exist in a hierarchy of their own. The only concern that a view has about the placement of an entry is that it must be a descendant of the parent of the view hierarchy.

52 Designing the directory tree