In several web applications, it is often necessary to define groups of users for purposes of membership as well as role management.
For example, in one of our applications we would like to user a group of "Network Engineers" and another group that consists of "Managers" of such Network Engineers. The information we need is contact details of members of each group.
So far, we have written our own tools to allow the administrator of the application to add/delete/move groups and their memberships and either store them in a XML file or a database.
Increasingly, companies already have the groups we want defined in LDAP/AD, so it would be best to create a pointer in our application to the correspoding group in LDAP.
Although there are a number of LDAP libraries and LDAP browsers available and we could code this and provide a web front end to get a list of available groups and their members, we are wondering if there is already a "component framework" available that would readily provide this LDAP browsing functionality that we could just embed this into our application. Something between a library and a full LDAP browser product ?
(To clarify, the use case is for an admin of our web application to create a locally relevant group name and then map it to an exiting LDAP group. To enable this in the UI, we would like to present a way for the admin to browse available groups in the company LDAP server, view their membership, and select the LDAP group they would like to map to the locally relevant group name. In a second step, we would then synchronize the members of that LDAP group and their contact details to a store in our application )
Appreciate any pointers.