Syntaxes for Attributes in Active Directory Domain Services

Active Directory Domain Services define a set of attribute syntaxes for specifying the type of data contained by an attribute. The predefined syntaxes do not actually appear in the directory, and you cannot add new syntaxes. Several methods can be used to identify the syntax of an attribute class:

• The IADs.Get, IADs.GetEx, IADs.Put, and IADs.PutEx methods use the VARIANT structure to get and set the values of an object's attributes. The vt member of this structure is a VARTYPE value that identifies the data type.
• The methods of the IDirectoryObject and IDirectorySearch interfaces use a value from the ADSTYPEENUM enumeration to specify the data type.
• To specify the syntax of a new attribute class, set the attributeSyntax and oMSyntax attributes of an attributeSchema object. If the value of oMSyntax is 127, you must also set the oMObjectClass attribute. For more information, see Choosing a Syntax.

For a complete list of the syntaxes provided by Active Directory Domain Services, including each syntax's corresponding VARTYPE and ADSTYPEENUM value, see Syntaxes.