Active Directory : PropertiesToLoad get all properties

Question

I try to get a List of all properties from an Object in the Active Directory.

What I have for now is this:

List<User> users = new List<User>();
try
{
    DirectoryEntry root = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE");
    root = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + root.Properties["defaultNamingContext"][0]);
    DirectorySearcher search = new DirectorySearcher(root);
    search.Filter = "(&(objectClass=user)(objectCategory=person))";

    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("samaccountname");
    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("displayname");
    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("mail");
    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("telephoneNumber");
    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("department");
    search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("title");

    SearchResultCollection results = search.FindAll();
    if (results != null)
    {
        foreach (SearchResult result in results)
        {
            foreach (DictionaryEntry property in result.Properties)
            {
                Debug.Write(property.Key + ": ");
                foreach (var val in (property.Value as ResultPropertyValueCollection)) { 
                    Debug.Write(val +"; ");
                }
                Debug.WriteLine("");
            }
        }
    }
}
catch (Exception ex)
{

}

But it gets only the properties I added with PropertiesToLoad. Is it possible to get all properties dynamically?

Answer 1

If you don't specify anything in PropertiesToLoad, you should get all the properties. Just remove the lines with search.PropertiesToLoad.Add.

Getting all the properties of all the users in the domain could be pretty heavy, however.

Answer 2

To get all propertyNames you can do:

 SearchResult result = search.FindOne();
 ResultPropertyCollection temp = result.Properties;

 string[] propertyNamesList = new string[temp.PropertyNames.Count];
 temp.PropertyNames.CopyTo(propertyNamesList, 0);

and propertyNamesList will contain everything there.