Effective pagination with Active Directory searches

Question

What would be an effective way to do pagination with Active Directory searches in .NET? There are many ways to search in AD but so far I couldn\'t find how to do it effectively.

Answer 1

You may try the virtual list view search. The following sort the users by cn, and then get 51 users starting from the 100th one.

    DirectoryEntry rootEntry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://domain.com/dc=domain,dc=com", "user", "pwd");

    DirectorySearcher searcher = new DirectorySearcher(rootEntry);
    searcher.SearchScope = SearchScope.Subtree;
    searcher.Filter = "(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user))";
    searcher.Sort = new SortOption("cn", SortDirection.Ascending);
    searcher.VirtualListView = new DirectoryVirtualListView(0, 50, 100);

    foreach (SearchResult result in searcher.FindAll())
    {
        Console.WriteLine(result.Path);
    }

For your use case you only need the BeforeCount, AfterCount and the Offset properties of DirectoryVirtualListView (the 3 in DirectoryVirtualListView ctor). The doc for DirectoryVirtualListView is very limited. You may need to do some experiments on how it behave.