On the ThinkPHP blog today, there's a new post from Stephanie Ehrling about simulating an LDAP connection and data request to PHP with LDIF.

An LDIF file is a simple text file that can contain those LDAP information, which can be separated into two groups. On the one hand, it can hold exported LDAP data in a text format. The other purpose of LDIF is to use it for importing data into an LDAP based system. So it can contain data to be imported or just commands that shall be processed. This is an important fact, because that opens the door to an interesting workaround.

This workaround allows you to import large amounts of data quickly and easy by dumping it into the server via a simple PHP script. The code is included in the post, but you'll need to have the binaries to get the LDIF and LDAP functionality working together.