Returning 'description' of group from AD

[cottonpants]

Hi - I have no hair left and am turning to you for help.

I am running an LDAP query to return all the members of all my groups in AD. Some groups have a description, some don't.

If I add 'description' to my attribute list to return, I only get groups that have a description. If I remove the attribute, I get all of them.

Under no circumstance have I been able to actual write out the description.

Here's my code - see anything glaringly wrong???
ADSIQueryText = "<LDAP://" & ADSINamingNC & ">;(&(objectCategory=group)(groupType:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2147483656));name,distinguishedName,description;subtree"

and then...

Output.WriteLine ADSIResult.Fields("distinguishedName").Value & CHR(9) & ADSIResult.Fields("name").Value & CHR(9) & ADSIResult.Fields("description")

is there something weird about the description field that I don't know about?
I have also tried
'if isnull(ADSIResult.Fields("description"))' and
'if len(ADSIResult.Fields("description")) = 0 '

logic to see if it makes a diffence but sadly not...

thanks in advance if you can help

 

[cottonpants]

found the answer...

apparently the 'group' attribute is a multiple value type attribute (similar to 'member' and 'member of') although it can only have 1 value. Go figure.

So in order to get the value you need to use the GetEx command and look at the first element in the array

e.g.
arrTest = GetStuff.GetEx("description")
strDescription = arrTest(0)

ta da