Views:

Applies To:

GroupID 8 and above - Self-Service

Business Scenario:

We have created several groups with an asterisk (*) in their display name, such as *Engineering. We are not able to search these groups using the Self-Service portal's advanced search. How can we search such groups?

More Information:

Using GroupID Self-Service, when we perform a search, it parses an LDAP search string to Active Directory. Since an asterisk character (*) is used as a wildcard operator in an LDAP filter, so when we search using an *, this would be a wildcard search that results in everything.

Similarly, when we search with "*eng", Active Directory will be queried for all objects starting with "eng" and search results will not include "*Engineering".

Escape characters are used in searches to filter out any special character, as shown below:

  1. Launch the Self-Service portal.
  2. On the Advanced Search page, provide the group's display name as "\2Aengineering".

    It will return the group "*Engineering".

    More characters that need to be escaped:

    Character Escape Character
    * \2A
    ( \28
    ) \29
    \ \5C
    Nul \00

Reference:

Active Directory: Characters to Escape

Keywords: Search, Self Service, \2a, Escape, Wildcard