Question about DirectoryEntry

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Guest

Hi
I had a small doubt about the working of DirectoryEntry.
I create a DirectorySearcher and search for a particular user on my domain
using
ds.Filter = "sAMAccountName="+username;
Then using SearchResult.GetDirectoryEntry() I get a DirectoryEntry object
representing the user, say de.
The question is:
Does the DirectoryEntry.Properties collection prefetch the
properties/attributes of the user, that are defined at Active Directory.
or is it that when I use de.Properties["xyz"], the value is queried against
Active Directory resulting in a network call.
I think it does prefetch since while debugging I can see the property count
as 35, but I want to be sure.
In addition, how is this related to caching of the attribute values,
specifically, the RefreshCache etc. methods.

Thanks in advance
Vikas Manghani
 
Does the DirectoryEntry.Properties collection prefetch the
properties/attributes of the user, that are defined at Active Directory.
or is it that when I use de.Properties["xyz"], the value is queried against
Active Directory resulting in a network call.
Click to expand...

When you first access the .Properties collection, most of the
attributes will be fetched for you. That's basically the behaviour of
the underlying ADSI .Get() call.

You *CAN* however specify to get only certain attributes, if you call
the .RefreshCache method on the DirectoryEntry and specify a list of
attributes to grab from the store into the properties cache.

Also, there are some more complex attributes that are only fetched /
evaluated when you specifically ask for that. Those need to be
explicitely requested by calling .RefreshCache with their attribute
name (things like 'tokenGroups' and others).

HTH
Marc
 
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