Novell EDIRECTORY 8.8 SP3, Administration Manual, Page: 164 / 634

164 Novell eDirectory 8.8 Administration Guide
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It is important to note that no forward references are allowed. Any attribute whose value you are
going to use must precede the current attribute in the attribute specification file. In the example
below, the cn as part of the dn is constructed from givenname, initial, and sn; therefore, these
attributes must preceed the dn in the settings file.
givenname: $R(first)
initial: $R(initial)
sn: $R(last) dn:o=novell,ou=dev,ou=ds,cn=$A(givenname,%.1s)$A(initial,%.1s)$A(sn)
The dn receives special handling in the LDIF file: no matter what the location of dn is in the settings,
it will be written first (as per LDIF syntax) to the LDIF file. All other attributes are written in the
order they appear.
Control Settings provide some additional controls for the object creation. All controls have an
exclamation point (!) as the first character on the line to separate them from attribute settings. The
controls can be placed anywhere in the file.
!COUNTER=300
!OBJECTCOUNT=2
!CYCLE=title
!UNICYCLE=first,last
!CYCLE=ou,BLOCK=10
Š
Counter
Provides the starting value for the unique counter value. The counter value is inserted to any
attribute with the $C syntax.
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Object Count
OBJECTCOUNT determines how many objects are created from the template.
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Cycle
CYCLE can be used to modify the behavior of pulling random values from the files ($R-
syntax). This setting has three different values.
!CYCLE=title
Anytime the list named “title” is used, the next value from the list is pulled rather than
randomly selecting a value. After all values have been consumed in order, the list starts from
the beginning again.
!CYCLE=ou,BLOCK=10
Each value from list “ou” is to be used 10 times before moving to the next value.
The most interesting variant of the CYCLE control setting is UNICYCLE. It specifies a list of
sources that are cycled through in left-to-right order, allowing you to create guaranteed unique
values if desired. If this control is used, the OBJECTCOUNT control is used only to limit the
number of objects to the maximum number of unique objects that can be created from the lists.
In other words, if the lists that are part of UNICYCLE can produce 15000 objects, then
OBJECTCOUNT can be used to reduce that number, but not to increase it.
For example, assume that the givenname file contains two values (Doug and Karl) and the sn
file contains three values (Hoffman, Schultz, and Grieger).With the control setting
!UNICYCLE=givenname,sn and attribute definition cn: $R(givenname) $R(sn), the following
cns are created: