How to find *where* in ActiveDirectory an attribute is stored? - powershell

Question

I want to use Power Query to extract a list of employee names including attributes such as username, telephone number, office number, etc.
I found an article that shows how to do just that:
http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/pull-your-global-address-book-into-excel/
However, my question is: if I wanted to return an attribute that I know that exists, but I haven't a clue where in the Active Directory object/table model it resides, how might one perform a search to find the specific table & attribute that must be queried?
EDIT - Additional Information
"Is this more of a PowerQuery question that a PowerShell question" - I think the answer is both yes and no.
This command:
Get-ADUser <someValidUserName> - Property *
...does indeed output all the attributes for the specified user. However, as far as I can tell there is no indication in the output as to where in the AD object hierarchy each attribute resides.
From the Power Query article linked above, we see several "tables" noted in the Power Query interface to Active Directory. One such table is organizationalPerson which contains an attribute named physicalDeliveryOfficeName. It would seem that the notion of an organizationalPerson "object" isn't exclusive to Power Query, as it seems to correspond to the Ldap-Display-Name as documented here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683883(v=vs.85).aspx
So what I was hoping for was a means to wildcard search the AD attribute names themselves for the existence of the word "office" anywhere within any attribute name in the AD user hierarchy, and for the search results to return physicalDeliveryOfficeName as a result, including the fact that it resides within organizationalPerson
(Hopefully that makes the question a bit more clear?)

Answer 1

For posterity: Here is a PowerShell script (See Get Class Attributes) that will list all Active Directory classes + class attributes for a specified SamAccountName. From the list of attributes, you can then run something like the following to get the attribute values
#make a list of desired class attributes
$Properties = #('DisplayName', 'SamAccountName', 'mail', 'otherMailbox')
Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "dc=myDomain,dc=gov" -Properties $Properties | select $Properties
Credit to: http://virot.eu/getting-all-possible-classes-attributes-for-a-ad-object/
Get Class Attributes
#Run on Win 7 machine with PS 4.0 against A.D. running on a Win 2008 R2 domain controller
cls
$attributeList = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
$attributeListItem = [ordered]#{}
Import-Module ActiveDirectory
#Get an AD User and request objectClass
$aDObj = Get-ADUser "MyAccountName" -Properties objectClass
#get all class names
$nextClass = $aDObj.ObjectClass
$allClasses = Do
{
$currentClass = $nextClass
$nextClass = Get-ADObject -SearchBase "$((Get-ADRootDSE).SchemaNamingContext)" -Filter {lDAPDisplayName -eq $nextClass} -properties subClassOf | Select-Object -ExpandProperty subClassOf
$currentClass
}
While($currentClass -ne $nextClass)
#Get all attributes
$mandatoryAndOptionalAttributes = 'MayContain','MustContain','systemMayContain','systemMustContain'
ForEach ($class in $allClasses)
{
$classInfo = Get-ADObject -SearchBase "$((Get-ADRootDSE).SchemaNamingContext)" -Filter {lDAPDisplayName -eq $class} -properties $mandatoryAndOptionalAttributes
ForEach ($mandatoryAndOptionalAttribute in $mandatoryAndOptionalAttributes)
{
foreach ($classAttribute in $classInfo.$mandatoryAndOptionalAttribute)
{
$attributeListItem."Mandatory/Optional Attribute" = $mandatoryAndOptionalAttribute
$attributeListItem."Class" = $classInfo.Name
$attributeListItem."Class Attribute" = $classAttribute
$attributeList.add((New-Object PSObject -Property $attributeListItem)) | out-null
}
}
}
$attributeList | out-gridview -title ("All Class Attributes: " + $attributeList.count)