Florian’s Blog

Hey there — this is a question that drives people crazy. I mean - you know that there’s an objects attribute filled with a value as you’ve seen it in ADUC or some place else but … ADSIEdit just doesn’t show it. How come?

A good example for this is ADSIEdit that comes with RSAT in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I’ve seen it on Windows Server 2003 too but it seems that Vista and 7 have this special behavior “built-in”. Say you open a user object and want to check what groups the user is member of… but… ooops:

…no “memberOf” attribute. You check a couple of other attributes and notice they’re missing, too. Examples are “directReports” or “masteredBy”. Looking closer at them, you notice that those attributes have one thing in common: they’re backlinks for AD’s linked attributes. I won’t bore you with the technical stuff on linked attributes - if you’re interested, I have another blog posting on this: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=130

You’re curious on how you turn the backlink attributes back on so they’re displayed? Sure, I’ll tell you. To my own surprise, this isn’t exposed in MMC’s menus like “Advanced Features” or somewhere near “View” where I’d probably search for it. It’s this little “Filter” button in the object’s properties…clever… that’s actually the point where you should start thinking about how often you wondered what that button was for - but never clicked it:

Apparently there’s more than just backlinks to hide and un-hide. Constructed attributes are another example. Just make your choice and those attributes are yours (again).