Active Directory, Second Edition

Manipulating Objects

Modifying objects with System.DirectoryServices can be done 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("attributename").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 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 instead set an attribute. The code in Example 28-2 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 28-2. Setting an attribute

Dim strADsPath As String Dim strAttrName As String Dim strAttrValue As String Try Dim intArgs As Integer = ...