The Novell Controls for ActiveX and Visual Basic:
Directories (Trees) and Entries

Novell Directory Services is a tree-structured database containing objects that represent users, groups of users, servers, workstations, printers, etc. Each database on a network is referred to as a Directory or Tree. Each tree typically contains one or more Organizations, which in turn, contain a hierarchy of Organizational Units. Organizations and organizational units are referred to as containers, because they can contain other objects. There are also country and locality containers, but they are rarely used. Objects that cannot contain other objects (User and Printer objects, for example), are called leaf objects.

NDS terms can sometimes be confusing, because there are frequently two or more terms that mean the same thing. For example, an NDS database can be referred to as a "directory," a "tree," or even a "directory tree," and the entities in a tree can be called either "objects" or "entries."

If you have used network administration tools like NWAdmin or ConsoleOne, you have seen representations of directories like the one shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: ConsoleOne's view of a directory.

Figure 1 shows a tree named DEVED that has three organizations. The organization named VerySmallCompany is expanded to show the structure of organizational units with the organization. The Marketing organizational unit has been selected to show that it contains two organizational units, Inbound and Outbound; three User entries, Peter Smith, Jeanne Smith, and Sharon Jones; and one entry of unknown type called "Marketing Division."