HOWTO: Using ADO to Access Objects Through ADSI LDAP Provider

ID: Q187529

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Visual Basic Professional and Enterprise Editions for Windows, version 5.0, on platform(s):
- Alpha, NT, Win95, x86

SUMMARY

The Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) version 2.0 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) provider implements OLE DB interfaces that allow you to use ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to access objects in LDAP compliant directories. You must create an ADO connection object and set its Provider property to "ADsDSOObject". You can specify any string, including "", as the connection string (first argument) of the ADO connection object's open method.

The connection object Execute method's CommandText (first object) is an LDAP query composed of four elements separated by semicolons, in the following format:

<LDAP://server/adsidn>;ldapfilter;attributescsv;scope

where:

server is the name (or IP address) of the server hosting the directory.

adsidn is the distinguished name (DN) of the starting point for your query expressed ADsPath format with "/" separators and the root of the namespace to the left. You can also use an X.500 style attributed name format with the relative distinguished names separated by commas and the root of the name space to the right.

filter is the LDAP filter string (see rfc2254).

attributescsv is a comma separated list of names of the attributes to be returned for each row in the recordset.

scope is either: base, onelevel, or subtree.

NOTE: rfc2253 specifies the LDAP syntaxes on which the ADSI LDAP syntax is based.

To return the ADsPath, class, and cn attributes of all the objects in all the recipient containers in an Exchange server, you can use the following CommandText (in URL format):


   LDAP:<//server/o=organization/ou=site/cn=recipients>;
      (objectClass=*);
   ADsPath,objectClass,cn;subtree"

or (in attributed name format):


  <LDAP://server/cn=recipients,ou=site,o=organization>, _
      (objectClass=*);ADsPath,objectClass;subtree

MORE INFORMATION

The following Visual Basic 5.0 sample code illustrates this query:

Sample Code


   Dim conn As Connection
   Dim rs As Recordset

   Set conn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
   conn.Provider = "ADSDSOObject"
   conn.Open "ADs Provider"

   Set rs conn.Execute( _
         "<LDAP://server/o=organization/ou=site/cn=recipients>; _
         (objectClass=*);ADsPath,objectClass,cn;subtree")

   While Not rs.EOF
      Debug.Print rs.Fields(0).Value, rs.Fields(1).Value, _
            rs.Fields(2).Value
      rs.MoveNext
   Wend

   conn.Close

Additional query words: kbVBp500 kbSDKPlat kbADO kbADSI kbDSupport kbdse


Keywords          : 
Version           : WINDOWS:5.0
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbhowto

Last Reviewed: May 11, 1999