New LDIF Editor Implementation

Nice to see that Softerra's LDAP Administrator now contains an LDIF editor, a feature that is available in Apache Directory Studio since 2007.

I played with version 2009.2 Beta. In general it looks very good. It provides syntax highlighting and code completion (called IntelliSense like in Visual Studio). It also supports RFC4525 (Modify-Increment). A very nice feature is to display and browse the hierarchical structure of the LDIF records.

However not everything is polished yet. I hope for the final release the following issues will be fixed:

1. The proposed object classes and attributes should be looked up from the directory schema.
2. The Modify-Increment proposal should only be shown if the directory server supports it.
3. Editing support for binary data and BASE-64 encoded values should be improved, especially for the userPassword attribute. 1 When executing the LDIF the currently selected directory server should be preselected. 1 Syntactic errors (e.g. attribute without colon) and sementic errors (e.g. attribute not allowed according to the object classes) should be made visible within the editor.

The Apache Directory Studio's LDIF editor hasn't been improved for a long time now. Maybe the existence of a competitor encourages me now ;-).