Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Manipulating Objects

Modifying objects with System.DirectoryServices can be accomplished a couple of different ways. To modify an attribute that currently has a value, you can set it using the Properties property. For example, the following code would modify the givenName attribute:

objADObject.Properties("givenName")(0) = "Robert"

If you want to set an attribute that was previously unset, you must use the Properties.Add method. The following code would set the previously unset sn attribute:

objADObject.Properties("sn").Add("Robert")

To determine whether an attribute has been set, you can use Properties(" attribute-name ").Count, which will return the number of values that have been set for the attribute. Just like with ADSI, all modifications are made initially to the local property cache and must be committed to the server. With ADSI, you would use the IADs::SetInfo( ) method, and with System.DirectoryServices, it is called CommitChanges( ), which is available from the DirectoryEntry class.

objADObject.CommitChanges(  )

Now that we covered how to set an attribute, we can modify the earlier code that printed all the values of an attribute to set an attribute instead. The code in Example 31-2 expects three command-line parameters: the first is the ADsPath of the object to modify, the second is the attribute name, and the third is the value to set the attribute to.

Example 31-2. Setting an attribute

Dim strADsPath As String Dim strAttrName As String Dim strAttrValue As String Try Dim ...