vanilla php ldap query works. Symfony 3 ldap query fails. Why? - ldap

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to use the Ldap class in Symfony3. I've successfully created and bound a connection but I can't get any results on a query. To make sure that the query actually works, I ran a bare php version:
if($lconn = ldap_connect('ds.mydomain.ca')){
ldap_set_option($lconn, LDAP_OPT_REFERRALS, 0);
ldap_set_option($lconn, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3);
if($lbind = ldap_bind($lconn,'webuser','password')){
$filter ="(&(sn=Smith)(givenname=J*))";
if(!$result = ldap_search($lconn, "dc=ds, dc=mydomain, dc=ca", $filter)) throw \Exception("Error in search query: ".ldap_error($lconn));
$output = ldap_get_entries($lconn, $result);
}else{
$output='bind failed';
}
} else {
$output= 'connection failed';
}
It returns the expected number of results.
On the other hand, this query done with Symfony 3's Ldap component returns 0 results:
//use Symfony\Component\Ldap\Ldap
$ldap = Ldap::create('ext_ldap', array(
'host' => 'ds.mydomain.ca',
'version' => 3,
'debug' => true,
'referrals' => false,
));
$ldap->bind('webuser', 'password');
$q = $ldap->query("dc=ds, dc=nrc, dc=ca", "(&(sn=Smith)(givenname=J*))");
$output = $q->execute();
Any idea why the Symfony ldap query fails when all its options should be identical to those I used for the bare php query?

Answer 1

I reposted this question on the Symfony github. #ChadSikorra was there too. And he made it clear what my issue was. Here's his explanation:
If you look at the collection class, nothing is done with the result
resource until initialize() is called in the class. If you do
return array('output' => array('bare' => $bare, 'symfony' =>
$symf->toArray())); it will call initialize and you'll see the
entries populated in the class. Unless there's something else going
on.

Answer 2

Do you still experience this issue with the latest 3.1+ versions?
Sorry but I don't go very often on Stack Overflow and spend most of my time on Github so I didn't see your question before.
As #ChadSikorra said, you should be using the toArray() method of the resulting Collection class, or you should iterate on the results directly.
The implementation is made so that the results are traversed in a memory-efficient manner, without storing all the results in an array by default, but the toArray() method can do this for you. Behind the scenes,it actually converts the resulting itératif to an array using the appropriate PHP function (iterator_to_array).
By the way, there used to be some inconsistency between the iterator and the toArray() function call, but that has been fixed in recent versions.
Cheers!