Property Pages for Use with Display Specifiers

A displaySpecifier object has two attributes that identify property pages to display in the property sheet for instances of an object class.

adminPropertyPages

Identifies administrative property pages to display in Active Directory™ administrative snap-ins.

shellPropertyPages

Identifies end-user property pages to display in the Microsoft® Windows® shell.

You can add values to these attributes in an existing displaySpecifier object to specify additional property pages to include in the administrative and/or end-user property sheets. For example, suppose you added a set of mayHave attributes to the schema definition of the contact class (see Extending the Schema). To display these new attributes to end users, you could specify additional property pages in the shellPropertyPages attribute of the contact-Display object for each supported locale. Then, when a user views a contact object, your property page is displayed with the rest of the property pages in the contact property sheet.

To add custom property pages to the property sheets for an object class

1. Write the property page COM object. The property page COM object must implement IShellExtInit and IShellPropSheetExt. See Implementing the Property Page COM Object.
2. Install the property page COM object on the computers where you want the extension property pages to be used. To do this, create a Microsoft® Windows® Installer package for your property page COM object's DLL and deploy the package appropriately using the group policy. See Using MSI and Windows 2000 Application Deployment to Distribute UI Additions.
3. Register the property page COM object in the adminPropertyPages and/or shellPropertyPages attributes of the displaySpecifier objects for the object class. See Registering the Property Page COM Object in a Display Specifier.

Note that you can register the same property page COM object for more than one object class.

Note that registration is specific to one locale. If the property page COM object applies to all locales, register it in the object class's displaySpecifier object in all of the locale subcontainers in the DisplaySpecifiers container. If the property page COM object is localized for a certain locale, register it in the displaySpecifier object in that locale's subcontainer.