I’ve fielded several questions lately about loading Group membership information from Active Directory. The Active Directory sample in the Qlikview Cookbook uses AdsDSO and can load “single-valued” fields such as Name and Mail. AdsDSO will not load “multi-valued” fields such as “memberOf” or “member” — fields that define group members.

To read multi-valued fields, you’ll have to install some sort of tool to extract the data into a format QV can load. There are a number of free and commercial utilities available that will extract AD information into a text file.

My favorite tool for AD extracts is the free Microsoft Logparser. Google for it, you’ll find lots of information as well as the download link. There is also a Logparser book and forum available.

Logparser can read data from many different inputs — Active Directory, IIS logs, Windows Event logs, Registry — to name a few. Logparser can write to several different output formats, CSV being the most useful for QV.

Logparser uses a SQL syntax for it’s queries. Here’s an example:

logparser -objClass:Group “select cn, member into tmpAdGroups.csv from LDAP://mydomainController”

This Logparser query will create the output file “tmpAdGroups.csv”. The file will contain one row for each group (cn). The members of the group will be returned as a single field with the members separated by the pipe “|” character. The members are easily separated in the QV load using the QV subfield() function:

subfield(member, ‘|’) as member

Other uses I’ve found for using Logparser with Qlikview:

• Extracting data from Windows Event logs.
• Preprocessing IIS log files. The fields contained in a IIS log can vary between sites and may also change dynamically within the same physical file. Logparser can neutralize these differerences and produce a common input for QV load.

Logparser is a favorite tool of mine. I use it frequently for non-Qlikview tasks as well.

-Rob

Update 12/12/2008 I’ve published a complete example of using logParser to extract Group and User data from AD for loading into QV. The example is in version 9 of the Qlikview Cookbook available at http://robwunderlich.com/Download.html