Directory Services

ADSI Properties and Attributes

When ADSI binding is established, accessing and manipulating data is perhaps the most common directory operation. A directory may contain thousands of attributes ready to be accessed and manipulated by applications such as administrative tools.

What are Properties?

Properties are the data members of directory objects. Properties are also referred to as attributes in some documents discussing directory services. For an ADSI object to be interesting and useful, you must be able to get and/or set its properties.

For example, given an IADs interface to an object, you might want to get the value of the description property. Properties are named values associated with an object. ADSI exposes some properties through the property methods of the various ADSI interfaces. For example, the IADs interface exposes properties such as Class and Name. Other properties are accessible through ADSI interface methods such as IADs::Get and IADs::Put.