Container Objects and Leaf Objects

A leaf object is an object that has no child objects. The term "container" refers to one of two things:

• An object of the container structural class.
• An object that has child objects.

Container is a structural class of object, which means that container objects can be created in Active Directory. In the schema, structural classes define objects that can be created as instances of the class in Active Directory. Other objects can be "container" objects in the general sense of the word (that is, they can have child objects), but they do not belong to the container class. For example, an organizational unit is a container object, although its class is organizationalUnit, not container. An organizational unit object has many attributes that provide functionality that an ordinary container does not have.

For more information about structural classes, see "Active Directory Schema" in this book.

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