Active Directory Cookbook

Chapter 4. Searching and Manipulating Objects

Introduction

Active Directory is based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and supports the LDAP v3 specification defined in RFC 2251. And while many of the AD tools and interfaces, such as ADSI, abstract and streamline LDAP operations to make things easier, any good AD administrator or developer must have a thorough understanding of LDAP to fully utilize Active Directory. This chapter will cover the some of the basic LDAP-related tasks you may need to do with Active Directory, along with other items related to searching and manipulating objects in the directory.

The Anatomy of an Object

The Active Directory schema is composed of a hierarchy of classes. These classes support inheritance, which enables reuse of existing class definitions. At the top of the inheritance tree is the top class, from which every class in the schema is derived. Table 4-1 contains a list of some of the attributes that are available from the top class, and subsequently are defined on every object that is created in Active Directory.

Table 4-1. Common attributes of objects

Attribute	Description
cn	Relative distinguished name (RDN) attribute for most object classes
createTimestamp	Timestamp when the object was created. See Recipe 4.22 for more information
description	Multivalued attribute that can be used as a generic field for storing a description of the object
displayName	Name of the object displayed in administrative interfaces ...