public class Rdn extends Object implements Serializable, Comparable<Object>

This class represents a relative distinguished name, or RDN, which is a component of a distinguished name as specified by RFC 2253. An example of an RDN is "OU=Sales+CN=J.Smith". In this example, the RDN consist of multiple attribute type/value pairs. The RDN is parsed as described in the class description for LdapName.

The Rdn class represents an RDN as attribute type/value mappings, which can be viewed using Attributes. In addition, it contains convenience methods that allow easy retrieval of type and value when the Rdn consist of a single type/value pair, which is how it appears in a typical usage. It also contains helper methods that allow escaping of the unformatted attribute value and unescaping of the value formatted according to the escaping syntax defined in RFC2253. For methods that take or return attribute value as an Object, the value is either a String (in unescaped form) or a byte array.

Rdn will properly parse all valid RDNs, but does not attempt to detect all possible violations when parsing invalid RDNs. It is "generous" in accepting invalid RDNs. The "validity" of a name is determined ultimately when it is supplied to an LDAP server, which may accept or reject the name based on factors such as its schema information and interoperability considerations.

The following code example shows how to construct an Rdn using the constructor that takes type and value as arguments:

      Rdn rdn = new Rdn("cn", "Juicy, Fruit");
      System.out.println(rdn.toString());
 

The last line will print cn=Juicy\, Fruit. The unescapeValue() method can be used to unescape the escaped comma resulting in the original value "Juicy, Fruit". The escapeValue() method adds the escape back preceding the comma.

This class can be instantiated by a string representation of the RDN defined in RFC 2253 as shown in the following code example:

      Rdn rdn = new Rdn("cn=Juicy\\, Fruit");
      System.out.println(rdn.toString());
 

The last line will print cn=Juicy\, Fruit.

Concurrent multithreaded read-only access of an instance of Rdn need not be synchronized.

Unless otherwise noted, the behavior of passing a null argument to a constructor or method in this class will cause NullPointerException to be thrown.