Editor's Note: This article is the final part of a 12-part series about Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI). The series started in the January 1999 issue. Refer to previous installments for definitions and background information.
For the Windows 2000's (Win2K's) Active Directory (AD) store to hold an object, the AD store needs a blueprint detailing that object's classes, attributes, and syntaxes. The AD schema stores the blueprints for all the objects that the AD store can hold. In other words, the AD schema contains details about all the classes, attributes, and syntaxes in the AD store.
Each object in the AD store is an instance of one or more classes in the schema. For example, the user cn=LeeFlight exists as an instance of the User class. Schema attributes define the pieces of information that a class, and thus an instance of that class, can hold. Among the many attributes that the User class can contain are TelephoneNumber (specifies the user's business telephone number), LastName (specifies the user's surname), and sAMAccountName (specifies the name that represents the user to Windows NT clients and servers that are lower in the Win2K hierarchy). The schema denotes whether an attribute is mandatory (e.g., sAMAccountName) or optional (e.g., TelephoneNumber). Syntaxes define the type of data that you can place in an attribute. For example, if the schema defines an attribute with the Boolean syntax, you can store True and False data in that attribute. . . .
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