Working with Active Directory Attributes with multi-values.

It is common for organisations to use or create Active Directory Attributes that may contain multiple different values and when trying to obtain the information using PowerShell you might receive

Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADPropertyValueCollection

Which isn’t helpful to man or beast. However, I have been recently working with custom attributes so its time to share my experiences once again. In this post I will be working with information that is located within my personal lab, where I have customattribute10 defined with O365.

# Command
Get-ADUser -Properties * -Filter * | Select-Object  samaccountname,customattribute10 | export-csv -Path  $env:USERPROFILE\desktop\test1.csv    

As you can see that from the above I am not receiving the desired output from Get-ADUser. So lets use a PowerShell string that obtains the required information

Let’s discuss the below string in detail to explain what each part does

@{name=” customattribute10 ”;expression={$_. customattribute10}}

The @ symbol, is the property you are retrieving is an array, which means it contains multiple values. Then you gave the property a name/label (you can name it anything you like). This will be the header of the column in the CSV file

@{name=” customattribute10 ”;

Then you provide an expression; this is the script block where you tell the PowerShell cmdlet what you are trying to fetch. For example; we want to fetch the values for the customattribute10 attribute.

expression={$_. customattribute10}}

So, now we understand the require array to pull the multi-values from lets execute the below command

# Command
Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties  proxyaddresses,customattribute10 | select samaccountname,  @{L='customAttribute10'; E={$_.customAttribute10}}  | Export-Csv -Path  $env:USERPROFILE\desktop\test.csv 

Now executing this command you will receive the correct output from the attribute which you desired.

Regards
The Author – Blogabout.Cloud