Ok, yeah, that worked.  Thanks!  There's a little more code in the
view and controller than I'd like, but I'll be able to refactor that
as I get better at Ruby.  :)

What I have now (the Person model just returns nil if there was an exception):

if !(@ldap_person = @person.get_ldap_user)
  flash[:error] = "User does not exist in LDAP or LDAP unreachable"
end

View:

<% if flash[:error] %>
	<%= flash[:error] %>
	<% flash[:error] = nil %>
<% else %>
....everything else for a successful user find...
<% end %>

So, yeah, not the best, but it definitely gets me to a place where I
can show this to the client and work on fleshing out error handling a
bit more.

Thank you!

Sean

On 4/6/06, Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs / netpromi.com> wrote:
> Sean Hussey wrote:
>
> >Hi everyone,
> >
> >I'm not quite sure how to handle this type of thing.  I have a method
> >that searches for a user in our LDAP by way of a Person model's
> >username attribute:
> >
> >@ldap_person = @person.get_ldap_user
> >
> >This method, noce done with the LDAP wrangling, returns the user entry
> >(an LDAP::Entry object) as a hash:
> >
> >return conn.search2(UnifiedLDAP::PEOPLE_DN, LDAP::LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE,
> >filter, self.ldap_attributes)[0].to_hash
> >
> >This works, and, of course, there SHOULD be an LDAP entry
> >corresponding to that Person, but if there isn't or LDAP is
> >unreachable, I want to report that.  Am I doing the wrong thing in
> >returning a hash?  Where should I be catching exceptions?  How should
> >I be then be dealing with them?
> >
> >This is part of a Rails app, but I don't think that part is important,
> >so I'm sticking to this list.  When I pass @ldap_person to the view,
> >though, and @ldap_person is an exception, obviously, this doesn't
> >work.
> >
> >
> One idea off the top of my head would be to catch the exception in
> #get_ldap_user and have the rescue clause return nil.  Then, when you
> pass @ldap_person to your view, you could have something like:  <%
> @ldap_person || "" %> in your rhtml file, so that if @ldap_person is
> nil, it just prints an empty string.
>
> HTH,
>
> Jamey
>
>