Platform SDK: Active Directory, ADSI, and Directory Services

Search Attributes Only

Sometimes you do a search to determine what type of information is available for a particular object. In this case, you are only interested in the attributes, not the values, of the object. To accomplish this, you set the search attributes only option. Specifying this option will return the attribute names without their values. However, the result set includes only those attributes that have values assigned. For example, consider an object with the following attributes:

First Name = John
Last Name = Smith
Department = <Empty>
Phone Number = (425) 432-3442

When the search attributes only option is set, the result set includes:

First Name
Last Name
Phone Number