C#: Getting members of a group the easy way with .Net 3.5 (Discussion groups, nested, recursive, security groups, etc.)

Just saw this being discussed internally and thought that it was quite useful to a lot of you out there so I thought I'd share.  The true boolean to grp.GetMembers tells it to recursively get the nested group members too.  I tested this out on discussion groups, security groups, with users and computers and works as expected. 

https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb339975.aspx

 using System; 
using System.Collections.Generic; 
using System.Text; 
using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement; 

namespace groupEnum 
{ 
    class Program 
    { 
        public static string groupName = string.Empty; 
        public static string domainName = string.Empty;

        static void Main(string[] args) 

        {     
                    groupName = args[0]; 
                    domainName = args[1]; 

                    PrincipalContext ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, domainName); 
                    GroupPrincipal grp = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(ctx, IdentityType.Name, groupName); 

                    if (grp != null) 
                    { 
                         foreach (Principal p in grp.GetMembers(true)) 
                            { 
                                Console.WriteLine(p.Name); //You can add more attributes, samaccountname, UPN, DN, object type, etc... 
                            }


                        grp.Dispose(); 
                        ctx.Dispose(); 

                    } 
                    else 
                    { 
                        Console.WriteLine("\nWe did not find that group in that domain, perhaps the group resides in a different domain?"); 
                    } 
                } 
                            
        }

}

 

Technorati Tags: C#,DS,Active Directory,.Net 3.5

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Update:  If you use this code and it blows up with a certain group with the exception: There is no such object on the server. Then: In my case the user it kept blowing up on was a deleted account which still was persistent in the directory because it had not been garbage collected yet.  When I ran the exe with elevated permission it completed as expected, but as a regular account you cannot see the object and therefore the framework doesn’t handle this.

• Anonymous
  September 06, 2008
  This is most valuable, thanks!

• Anonymous
  July 13, 2009
  PrincipalContext should be disposed. using (PrincipalContext ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, domainName)) { ... }