Carl Henderson

We use a Java class, accessed through Peoplecode housed in Peoplesoft’s Portal application, to change user passwords in LDAP. Currently, we’re running a SunOne LDAP server, whose rights were recently acquired by Oracle. A decision has been made to replace SunOne with Microsoft Active Directory. This change presented several challenges, but today I’ll mention specifically the obstacle I faced to reset AD passwords using Java.

Tools used

1. Eclipse IDE
2. AD Explorer
3. AD Error codes

Hurdle #1: SSL libraries

The existing Java code for establishing a secure connection to SunOne uses older libraries from novell:

com.novell.ldap.LDAPConnection(new LDAPJSSESecureSocketFactory());

For some reason, I could not form an SSL connection to AD using this library. It wasn’t until I switched to JNDI that I was able to successfully bind to AD over SSL.

Hurdle #2: Resetting passwords

In AD, an error will be thrown if an attempt is made to perform a “restricted operation” without having the proper credentials or binding over SSL. Becoming familiar with the various error codes helped tremendously. Now to the gritty stuff…

SunOne and AD store passwords differently. From what I read/encountered with SunOne, a plain text password could be used to REPLACE the value in the userPassword attribute, and SunOne will take care of the encryption itself. This is not the case for AD. I spent plenty of time researching the web how to encrypt AD passwords before updating the UnicodePwd attribute. Fortunately, I came across a website that provided the source code to encrypt passwords in a manner that AD liked. Thanks Jeremy Morris!

When I set out to create an application that launches a URL of my choosing, it was hard for me to find one place that walked me through exactly what I needed to do. It took me a lot of digging but I was able to do the following:

1. Complete the initial java setup/installation
2. Download Blackberry JDE
3. Leverage Blackberry sample code
4. Compile and Run Using the Simulator

Initial java setup/installation

To begin, first we must setup our development environment. This means we need to make sure we have the latest Java Development Kit (JDK). This is available from Sun directly and includes the Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) and command-line development tools that are used for developing applets and applications, like the one I will show you.

Download Blackberry JDE

Once we have the core java components installed, we move on to installing the Blackberry JDE. This is available from the Blackberry Developers Resource site. You will need to download the Blackberry Java Development Environment (JDE) which sits on top of the java components we installed earlier. This suite should come with the Blackberry MDS Simulator and Blackberry Device Simulators.  We’ll get back to these.

Leverage Blackberry sample code

By default, the Blackberry JDE will install to “C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry JDE 4.5.0“. There is a Workspace file that you should open next. It rests in the “JDE directory\samples\samples.jdw“. Find the sample code we want to use.

Line 71 shows the URL that is going to be opened:

PrimaryResourceFetchThread thread = new PrimaryResourceFetchThread("http://www.google.com", null, null, null, this);

Before you compile and run this, make sure you are running MDS which simulates data services through your computer’s internet connection (among other things). Now you’re ready to run it through the simulator. This should begin automatically when you hit F5.

Now, navigate to the application that you were working on… in this case it would be BrowserContentManagerDemo and click to start the app!

Final Note

It took me longer than expected to write this. Primarily because I wanted it to be as straight-forward and detailed as possible so I ran out of time to go over how to create images and set them as your application’s icon. But I will cover that in a future post, as well as how to get the application loaded onto your device. In the meantime, I’m sure you can keep yourself quite busy with the simulator. Enjoy.