This app provides Android 2.x devices the ability to synchronize contacts with an LDAP database. This tool is a work in progress. Using it with real contact data is not recommended at this point.
Limitations of the current iteration:
- Only supports a syncing with a single source, which is called "Testing Account".
- Synchronization is one-way (contacts from LDAP can't be edited)
Both of these limitations will be addressed eventually.
All the code is in the info.codethink.ldapsync package. There are three main components: the app, which is started via the AccountList activity. It's currently mostly used to edit account settings by launching the LDAPAuthneticatorActivity but will do more in the future.
The other two pieces are hooked into the Android account/synchronization system. The account management component consists of the LDAPAuthenticator* classes. LDAPAuthenticatorService just hooks the LDAPAuthenticator into Android's centralized account management code. There's some magic in the manifest to make that happen. LDAPAuthenticator implements the account management protocol so that LDAP accounts show up in the "Accounts & Sync" settings panel and the option to create them is presented when you go to create a new account from there. Whenever the authenticator needs to talk to the user it returns an intent to launch the LDAPAuthenticatorActivity; currently the only times Android will actually make that happen are for new accounts and when authentication fails on an existing account.
The last piece is the LDAPSyncService/LDAPSyncAdapter pair (again, the service is just Android's entry point into the adapter). These do the actual sync of contacts between the LDAP server and the phone's contact database. Android will call into the adapter when a sync is manually requested from the Accounts & Sync panel, or automatically every so often if automatic sync is enabled. The adapter uses LDAPSyncMapping and LDAPContactSource to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The LDAPSyncMapping class parses the res/raw/basicmapping.xml file and does some reflection on the Android contact DB interface classes to determine how to map LDAP attributes to rows in the android contact DB. The LDAPContactSource class handles setting up the actual connection to the LDAP server and setting up the parameters for the LDAP query to get contacts.
As mentioned above, the res/raw/basicmapping.xml is a custom XML microformat for mapping LDAP to Android contact-ese. It's in raw because I couldn't figure out how to hook an Android XML resource up to the android.sax-based parser I wrote in LDAPSyncMapping.Parser. Go figure.
The only drawable resource is the default Android app icon. I'll swap it for something better later.
layouthas:accountlistandaccountlistentryfor theAccountListeditaccountwhich is used to edit LDAP account settings and testthe connections. (There's a separate landscape version in
layout-landto test orientation switching.)
loginwhich would theoretically be used for authentication failuresbut hasn't been tested.
pickerlistandpickerlistentrywhich are used for the LDAP entrypicker activity, which can be used to browse for the query base DN in the account settings view.
xmlhas a bunch of XML files referenced from the manifest:ldapauthenticatorwhich is referenced from the manifest and givesAndroid the icon and label for the LDAP account type.
ldapcontactsourcewhich describes the LDAP contact source, and mayeventually include some markup to tell the contacts app how to render custom contact data items.
ldapsyncadapterwhich tells Android that LDAP accounts can sync contactdata (and also that the adapter is currently read-only sync).
values has strings (for future i18n) and misc which has the list of values currently in the security types dropdown.
Improve the way SSL/TLS certs are handled, to allow prompting the user for certificate trust. Also need to change the way the dropdown values are set up so that the entries are translatable. As is, adding a misc.xml in another languate would break things.