NDS® 8 is designed to handle hundreds of thousands of objects in a single container. To handle such large numbers of objects, the NDS/Novell® eDirectory™ database has per-server indexes for the objects which sort the objects by the object's RDN, given name, and surname, to name a few. The eDirectory iterator functions access these indexes and allow developers to position an iterator object on entries in the index and to retrieve information about groups of eDirectory objects. The iterator functions can also be used on eDirectory servers running earlier versions of NDS.
The following sections introduce you to the iterator objects and the virtual lists they reference, explain how the functions position the iterator in the list, and describe how to extract data from the list.