Question about DirectoryEntry

[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

 

[Marc Scheuner]

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.

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