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

Waaaay late to the party, but this is what I'm doing:

I'm using FindOne() instead of FindAll() and member;range=- on PropertiesToLoad.

There's a catch on member;range: when it's the last page, even if you pass member;range=1000-1999 (for instance), it returns member;range=1000-*, so you have to check for the * at the end to know if there is more data.

public void List PagedSearch()
{ 
    var list = new List();
    bool lastPage = false;
    int start = 0, end = 0, step = 1000;

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

    var filter = "(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(samAccountName=*foo*))";

    using (var memberSearcher = new DirectorySearcher(rootEntry, filter, null, SearchScope.Base))
    {
        while (!lastPage)
        {
            start = end;
            end = start + step - 1;

            memberSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Clear();
            memberSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add(string.Format("member;range={0}-{1}", start, end));

            var memberResult = memberSearcher.FindOne();

            var membersProperty = memberResult.Properties.PropertyNames.Cast().FirstOrDefault(p => p.StartsWith("member;range="));

            if (membersProperty != null)
            {
                lastPage = membersProperty.EndsWith("-*");
                list.AddRange(memberResult.Properties[membersProperty].Cast());
                end = list.Count;
            }
            else
            {
                lastPage = true;
            }
        }
    }
    return list;
}