I was working with an app that would take an LDAP query from <cfldap> and do a bunch of processing against it. As it turns out, the LDAP query was targeted on an OU that wasn't grabbing all of the accounts it needed to process. There was a sibling OU that also needed to be included in the results.

I already had scope="SUBTREE" in the <cfldap> call, so I could've just set the context of the LDAP query to the parent of both OU's, but then it would grab a whole bunch of accounts that were in OU's that shouldn't be included in the processing. I could have restricted what was being pulled with a filter, but I already had several filters in the LDAP call and I didn't want to complicate that any further.

Well, think simpler then. What about just wrapping the LDAP call and its processing with a <cfloop>, executing against the different OU's each time? If the processing were simpler, that could've worked, but there is report generation and other stuff going on, and really all the accounts needed to be processed in one sweep.

There is still a simple solution: Query of Queries. Perform each LDAP call separately, then join the results together with a simple UNION statement.

Now all the processing that occurs in my <cfoutput> tags that process the LDAP results will all happen in one sweep, with very few lines of code being altered, and none of my processing code had to be altered.

I simplified the code for this post, but in the app, the OU's are defined by a config file. So, the <cfldap> calls are executed in a loop, and then the SQL with the union statement is also generated by a loop based on the setting in the config file. So, at a later time, more OU's could be added with no additional coding required.