Active Directory / LDAP as a data source?

[dataMack]

Has anyone been able to use an Active Directory / LDAP structure as a data source to query within Alteryx?  This would be useful for checking group membership of users.

[dataMack]

I found this on GitHub: https://github.com/tobiasmh/Alteryx-Ldap-Input-Plugin-Binaries

But not sure what to make of it.  I can't copy .dlls into an admin only directory anyway.

[Cristian]

http://www.cdata.com/drivers/activedirectory/odbc/

http://www.cdata.com/drivers/ldap/odbc/

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Cristian

[jason_scarlett]

The CData ODBC driver works to query user level data.

Has anyone been able to filter it to a list of users that are members of a particular group? .. or if there are plans for Alteryx to include this capability.

For me to get it to work:

User: had to have the domain\username format

Server: I launched "Active Directory Domain and Trusts" and took the name listed on the left

Base DN: I used the "Active Directory Administrative Center" >> Overview  to search for a specific user and then copy the Path shown to get the Base DN.

  For me ... OU=Inactive,OU=Users,OU=Accounts,DC=my,DC=domain,DC=ca

I left the rest alone. 

[adm510]

@dataMack

I wrote a PowerShell script to to pull AD groups for every single user which is refreshed every few hours into a database.  You will definitely want to use the LDAP_MATCHING_RULE_IN_CHAIN filter in your query, this will ensure that you recursively get all groups for a particular user.

For example, suppose you have have the following 3 AD groups:

1. Acme Co Employees
2. Acme Co Contractors
3. Acme Co Employees and Contractors

Now suppose you're in group 1, and group 1 is also a member of group 3, that means you're technically a member of group 1 & 3. I haven't used the CData connector, but I'm not sure if it would be able to catch this.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa746475(v=vs.85).aspx

[jason_scarlett]

Good point, nested groups could complicate things.

I too have a powershell script that pulls AD group info. I was hoping to consolidate it into an Alteryx workflow and to be able to run it on demand.

[adm510]

Why not have Alteryx call the Powershell script for you, that's how I have my script scheduled.  I use PowerShell to dump the output to a CSV and Alteryx parses it as needed.

[jason_scarlett]

That's my plan if I can't get the ODBC connection to do what I want.

I don't have much Powershell experience and would prefer an in-tool solution. As it stands I/we already have too many Powershell/DOS scripts and find them hard to track/debug/monitor. As a team lead, I find that the GUI of Alteryx makes managing things easier amongst the team. Mainly a personal preference I guess.

[LATHROPS]

I'm using Excel PowerQuery.   It's a pretty crummy way to do it in my opinion, but it's what I have and what I'm using.

1. Solved: Active Directory query group membership for a user - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com...

2. Excel Get & Transform – Extract information from Active Directory – 4sysops

I would prefer a nice API contained within Alteryx though.