Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Advanced Search Function: SearchAD

We will now take many of the concepts from this chapter and apply them in a useful example called SearchAD. SearchAD can be included in any VBScript and used immediately as is.

SearchAD takes five parameters and returns a Boolean indicating whether it succeeded or failed in the search. You should recognize most of these parameters:

• The base ADsPath to start the search from

• A valid ADO criteria string

• The depth that you wish to search, represented by one of the exact strings Base, OneLevel, or SubTree

• The comma-separated list of attributes that is to be returned

• A variable that will hold the returned results of the search in an array

The last parameter does not have any values when passed in, but if SearchAD is successful, the array contains the resultset.

Here is an example use of SearchAD:

    bolIsSuccess = SearchAD("LDAP://ou=Finance,dc=mycorp,dc=com", _
      "(cn=a*)", "Base", "cn,description", arrSearchResults)

You can also use it as part of an If...Then condition:

    If SearchAD("LDAP://dc=mycorp,dc=com", "(description=moose)", "SubTree", _
      "ADsPath,cn,description", arrSearchResults) Then
      'success code using arrSearchResults
    Else
      'failure code
    End If

The array that is returned is a two-dimensional array of attributes that match the criteria. If there were 12 results returned for the preceding query, this is how you access the results:

 arrSearchResults(0,0) 'ADsPath of first result arrSearchResults(0,1) 'CN of first result arrSearchResults(0,2) 'Description ...