The LDAP v3 was designed with extensibility in mind. Controls The LDAP v3 allows the behavior of any operation to be modified through the use of controls . Any number of controls may be sent along with an LDAP request, and any number of controls may be returned with its results.
Controls can be standard or proprietary.
The Controls sections of this lesson describe controls in detail and gives examples of how to use some of the more popular controls. The request contains an identifier that identifies the request and the arguments of the request, and the response contains the results of performing the request. For example, an extension is possible for Start TLS, which is a request for the client to the server to activate the TLS protocol. The Extensions section of this lesson describes extensions in more detail. The javax.naming.ldap Package Controls and extensions are supported by classes and interfaces in the javax.naming.ldap package.