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Learn how to view and edit an Active Directory object’s Canonical Name with the options described in this guide.

Option 1: View Canonical Name From ADUC

1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers, click View and select Advanced Features.

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Open-Active-Directory-Users-and-Computers-click-View-and-select-Advanced-Features
  1. After that, navigate the AD container, where the object is located, right-click the object and select Properties.
  1. Then, click the Object tab – the Canonical Name is displayed on this tab.

Option 2: View Canonical Name with PowerShell

  1. Open PowerShell on a computer that has access to a Domain Controller.
  2. Then, get the object’s distinguishedName by running the command below. The command saves the result in the $distinguishedName variable.
$distinguishedName = (Get-ADObject -Filter {Name -eq 'Anthony Raj'}).DistinguishedName
In the above command, ‘Anthony Raj’ is the AD Display Name of the object I want to get its CN. Here is the result of the command. To confirm that it worked, I executed the variable.
Then, get the object's distinguishedName by running the command below. The command saves the result in the $distinguishedName variable.
  1. Finally, display the objects Canonical Name by running this command:
Get-ADObject -filter {distinguishedname -eq $distinguishedName} -properties canonicalName

The command displayed other properties. To display just the CN, modify the command as shown below.

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(Get-ADObject -filter {distinguishedname -eq $distinguishedName} -properties canonicalName).CanonicalName
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Conclusion

An AD object’s canonicalName displays the object in the canonical format. This shows the full path of the object in AD, separated by a forward slash (/).

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If you need to view this property in Active Directory, you can use ADUC or PowerShell as I have shown in this quick guide.

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