What's in a Name?

Name Parsers

To parse a name means to use its string representation (java.lang.String) to obtain its structural representation ( Name). The JNDI provides a name parser for composite names and a generic interface for compound name parsers. Service providers provide the actual implementations of name parsers for compound names exported by their namespaces.

Composite Names

To parse a composite name, you pass its string representation to the CompositeName constructor . For example, the following code parses a string name into a structured name, CompositeName.

// Parse string name into CompositeName
Name cname = new CompositeName(
    "cn=homedir,cn=Jon Ruiz,ou=people/tutorial/report.txt");

See the Composite Name Section for examples of how to access and change the components of a CompositeName.

Compound Names

To parse a compound name, you use the NameParser interface. This interface contains a single method:

Name parse(String name) throws InvalidNameException;

To parse a compound name, you must first obtain a NameParser from the service provider that supports the namespace. Here is an example that obtains name parsers for the LDAP namespace and file namespace.

// Create the initial context
Context ctx = new InitialContext();

// Get the parser for LDAP
NameParser ldapParser = 
    ctx.getNameParser("ldap://localhost:389/o=jnditutorial");

// Get the parser for filenames
NameParser fsParser = ctx.getNameParser("file:/");

See the Compound Name Section for more examples of how to get a NameParser instance.

Once you have an instance of a NameParser, you can use its parse() method to parse compound names. Continuing with the example, you can use ldapParser to parse an LDAP string name into its structural form:

// Parse name using LDAP parser
Name compoundName = ldapParser.parse("cn=John Smith, ou=People, o=JNDITutorial");

Similarly, you can use fsParser to parse a file name:

// Parse name using LDAP parser
Name compoundName = fsParser.parse("tmp/tutorial/beyond/names/parse.html");

Note that each parser determines the syntax of names that it will accept. If you supply a valid filename that is not a legal LDAP name to an LDAP parser, you will get an InvalidNameException.

See the Compound Name Section for examples of how to access and change the components of a compound name.

Although the parse() method returns a Name, NameParser is intended for use only for compound names, not composite names. The object returned by parse() might or might not be an instance of CompoundName . The only requirement is that it implements the Name interface. The exact type of the object returned depends on the service provider implementation.

What's in a Name?