LEX Online Manual Content

Deleting Directory Objects

If you want to delete objects from the LDAP directory you are connected with, there are several different ways to do this:

To delete objects, you first have to focus either the treeview panel or the object list panel in the LEX main window. If you are in the object list, you also could select several objects and remove them all together in one step.
You can use now the menu option Edit - Delete Object to open the Create New Object dialog.
You could also use the Delete object button .
Or you just press DELETE or use the Delete Object / Delete Container option from the context menu (right mouse click in the treeview or object list).
There may be situations where the options and buttons for deleting objects may be disabled. This might be if the LEX ReadOnly Mode is active, or when the application focus lays on the attribute list.

The delete operation includes child objects and subtrees which may exists under the regarding objects. Since this might be an irreversible change to the directory, please read very carefully the notes below about object removals.

Object deletion warning

You will be asked if you really want to remove the object(s) from the directory, even if you say Yes here, another warning comes up if LEX detects that there are child objects under one of the selected objects.

Object with children deletion warning

Before you choose not to see this warning any more, you should carefully read the notes below about object removals. Once you deactivated the warnings, you can activate them again in the menu option Tools - Options - Dialogs.

ATTENTION: LEX cannot undo a delete operation in the directory. The reason is that in every directory system, there are unique attributes which cannot be written by an LDAP client, even when he's authenticated as a very high privileged user.

A user object for example could have some kind of global unique ID, or a security identifier, or the values for the objects creation time. All these attributes cannot be set by LEX - regardless which permission you have. So when a user was deleted, it is literally impossible to create an identical object to undo the user deletion. However, there might be directory-specific ways to resurrect a deleted object (for example the Active Directory Recycle Bin which can be used since Windows Server 2008 R2). But remember: these possibilities depends on the directory service, LEX itself CANNOT UNDO AN OBJECT DELETION!

During the delete operation, you see the progress and can abort it every time:

Object deletion progress output