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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T07:01:05+00:00

I’ve been trying to read and set the departmentNumber property for a DirectoryEntry object

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I’ve been trying to read and set the departmentNumber property for a DirectoryEntry object using C#, but I always have the problem that using ADSI Edit I cannot see that anything in this entry was changed.

Approaches I’ve tried so far include:

directoryEntry.Properties["departmentNumber"].Value = new object[]{ "SomeContent" };

and

directoryEntry.InvokeSet("departmentNumber", new object[]{ "SomeContent" };

and

directoryEntry.Invoke("PutEx", new object[]{ 2, "departmentNumber", new object[]{"SomeContent"}});

and 

directoryEntry.Invoke("Put", new object[]{ "departmentNumber", "SomeContent" });

Update
All of the above followed by directoryEntry.CommitChanges();.

No matter what I try, I do (with some of the examples above) get results in terms of being able to read the value again using corresponding code, but whenever I use the ADSI-Editor and look at the properties of the user, I cannot see that departmentNumber contains any data.

If I set the property to a certain value using ADSI-Editor, I also cannot query that particular value via C#, but what I can do is to use a very simple VB script as below:

Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://CN=........")
objUser.GetInfo
objUser.PutEx 2, "departmentNumber", Array("SomeContent")

This does change the value of the property that I can see in the ADSI-Editor, but again, using C# I cannot read it.

What is the problem here, and why does it look as if there are two different “departmentNumber” properties? Despite trying to find someone with the same problem I didn’t come up with any answers or even pointers in the right direction, so any help is greatly appreciated. Please also ask in case you need more information.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You just forgot to commit changes. It’s necessary usin ADSI. Here is an example of a user création and modification :

    static void Main(string[] args)
{
  /* Connection to Active Directory
   */
  DirectoryEntry deBase = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://192.168.225.100:389/OU=SousMonou,OU=MonOu,DC=dom,DC=fr", "jpb", "pwd");

  /* User creation
  */
  DirectoryEntry auser = deBase.Children.Add("cn=a User", "user");
  auser.CommitChanges();

  auser.Properties["samaccountname"].Value = "AUser";
  auser.Properties["givenName"].Value = "A";
  auser.Properties["sn"].Value = "User";
  auser.Properties["displayName"].Value = "AUser";
  auser.Properties["userPrincipalName"].Value = "AUser@dom.fr";
  auser.Properties["pwdLastSet"].Value = 0;
  auser.Properties["userAccountControl"].Value = 544;

  auser.CommitChanges();

  /* Retreiving the user
  */
  DirectorySearcher dsLookForDomain = new DirectorySearcher(deBase);
  dsLookForDomain.Filter = "(&(cn=a User))";
  dsLookForDomain.SearchScope = SearchScope.Subtree;

  SearchResult srUser = dsLookForDomain.FindOne();
  if (srUser != null)
  {
    DirectoryEntry deUser = srUser.GetDirectoryEntry();
    deUser.Properties["departmentNumber"].Value = "Test Department";
    deUser.CommitChanges();
  }
}
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