Function Families

Functions that allow access to LDAP servers have two families of functions; these are synchronous and asynchronous functions. The synchronous functions have an _s as a suffix.

Asynchronous	Synchronous
ldap_simple_bind	ldap_simple_bind_s
ldap_search_ext	ldap_search_ext_s
ldap_add_ext	ldap_add_ext_s
ldap_modify_ext	ldap_modify_ext_s
ldap_delete_ext	ldap_delete_ext_s

The asynchronous functions allow the search to take place in background while some other work is being done. The synchronous functions block until a result is returned.

There is also a group of regular functions without the ext. The "ext" (extended) functions allow a timeout to be specified. This is useful when accessing remote LDAP servers that may be temporarily unavailable due to Internet connection problems or traffic volume.