Get Distinguished Name for a user

Anatoly Mironov

To get the distinguished name for a user, it isn’t enough to get an SPUser object. The distinguished name is the unique string for identifying a user in Active Directory (eg. CN=BeforeDAfter,OU=Test,DC=North America,DC=Fabrikam,DC=COM) Even using UserProfile object is not that clear. The distinguished name can be found in a property which can be retrieved with brackets: up[PropertyConstants.DistinguishedName]

public static string GetDistinguishedName(string login)
{
   var dn = "";
   UserProfile up;
   using (var site = new SPSite("http://dev"))
   {
      var serviceContext = SPServiceContext.GetContext(site);
      var upm = new UserProfileManager(serviceContext);
      var exists = upm.UserExists(login);
      if (!exists)
         upm.CreateUserProfile(login);
      if (exists)
      {
         up = upm.GetUserProfile(login);
         dn = up\[PropertyConstants.DistinguishedName\].Value.ToString();
      }
   }
   return dn;
}
```The code is simplified and doesn't contain any error handling. And a better handling of upm.UserExists must be implemented: If upm.CreateUserProfile(login) runs, it doesn't make it so quickly and the next step won't run (upm.GetUserProfile). If you are not working in SP Context, you can see the distinguished name for a user in Powershell:

import-module activedirectory $u = get-aduser administrator $u.DistinguishedName