What format is UserProfile_GUID?

Question

LATER EDIT: UserProfile_GUID has nothing to do with objectguid in LDAP. However, it can be used as DN like this dn=<GUID={the_string} when you bind to LDAP. UserProfile_GUID and objectguid are different things

I want to send the current user's UserProfile_GUID to a php script that searches the LDAP server by the objectguid property, giving me the user's name.

The problem is bin2hex(objectguid) in php returns a different value from the UserProfile_GUID that's showing in Sharepoint.

So what format is UserProfile_GUID in Sharepoint? How can I use it to search the LDAP server?

UserProfile_GUID in Sharepoint is something like xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

LATER EDIT: Is there any way I can find some common ID between Sharepoint user propreties and php LDAP? So I can use it to validate the user from Sharepoint to php

Answer 1

The ObjectGUID is a binary string ( or octet string ), so what you are probably seeing is some random nonsense characters when you attempt display the value.

The ObjectGUID actually follows a well-established standard - it's a UUID version 4. With this information, you should be able to decode the binary string into a readable string representation.

Take a look at this implementation of the conversion in php.

Here's the function in question. It expects the $guid in its original binary form as returned from server.

function _to_p_guid( $guid )
{
$hex_guid = unpack( "H*hex", $guid );
$hex    = $hex_guid["hex"];

$hex1   = substr( $hex, -26, 2 ) . substr( $hex, -28, 2 ) . substr( $hex, -30, 2 ) . substr( $hex, -32, 2 );
$hex2   = substr( $hex, -22, 2 ) . substr( $hex, -24, 2 );
$hex3   = substr( $hex, -18, 2 ) . substr( $hex, -20, 2 );
$hex4   = substr( $hex, -16, 4 );
$hex5   = substr( $hex, -12, 12 );

$guid = $hex1 . "-" . $hex2 . "-" . $hex3 . "-" . $hex4 . "-" . $hex5;

return $guid;
}

---

2. Other Approach

All you need to do when retrieving the objectguid is convert it to hex with

$hex_guid = bin2hex($binary_guid);

then to get it into a format to query the active directory there needs to be an escape character every 2 characters like:

4e\7c\70\75\e7\ac\e4\44\af\00\b1\16\28\39\25\7b

here's the function to use:

function FormatGUID($hexGUID){

        $hexGUID = str_replace("-", "", $hexGUID);

        for ($i = 0; $i <= strlen($hexGUID)-2; $i = $i+2){

            $output .=  "\\".substr($hexGUID, $i, 2);
        }

        return $output;
    }

I've not tested this very much yet though, so beware!