How to get “Company” and “Department” from Active

Question

Is this possible? Code sample would be nice.

Answer 1

Actually, the question was how to get two of the properties for a .NET 3.5 (System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.)UserPrincipal-object not given a userPrincipalName.

Here how to do that with an extension method:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using System.DirectoryServices;
using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement;

namespace MyExtensions
{
    public static class AccountManagementExtensions
    {

        public static String GetProperty(this Principal principal, String property)
        {
            DirectoryEntry directoryEntry = principal.GetUnderlyingObject() as DirectoryEntry;
            if (directoryEntry.Properties.Contains(property))
                return directoryEntry.Properties[property].Value.ToString();
            else
                return String.Empty;
        }

        public static String GetCompany(this Principal principal)
        {
            return principal.GetProperty("company");
        }

        public static String GetDepartment(this Principal principal)
        {
            return principal.GetProperty("department");
        }

    }
}

The above code will work in most cases (that is it will work for standard Text/String Single-Value Active Directory attributes). You'll need to modify the code and add more error handling code for your environment.

You use it by add the "Extension Class" to your project and then you can do this:

PrincipalContext domain = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain);
UserPrincipal userPrincipal = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(domain, "youruser");
Console.WriteLine(userPrincipal.GetCompany());
Console.WriteLine(userPrincipal.GetDepartment());
Console.WriteLine(userPrincipal.GetProperty("userAccountControl"));

(BTW; this would have been a great use for Extension Properties - too bad it won't be in C# 4 either.)

Answer 2

Something like this should do it if the department and company properties exist for the user.

DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry();
de.Path = "LDAP://dnsNameOfYourDC.my.company.com";
DirectorySearcher deSearch = new DirectorySearcher(de);
deSearch.PropertiesToLoad.Add("department");
deSearch.PropertiesToLoad.Add("company");

deSearch.SearchScope = SearchScope.Subtree;
deSearch.Filter = "(&(objectClass=User)(userPrincipalName=MyPrincipalName))";
SearchResultCollection results = deSearch.FindAll():

foreach (SearchResult result in results)
{
    ResultPropertyCollection props = result.Properties;
    foreach (string propName in props.PropertyNames)
    {
       //Loop properties and pick out company,department
       string tmp = (string)props[propName][0];
    }
}