Getting Active Directory UserId from Windows Claim in SharePoint 2013

We’ve always used NTLM for our SharePoint authentication but in SharePoint 2013, claims is the preferred authentication method.  Fortunately, SharePoint 2013 ships with something called Windows Claims.  This seems to work the same as the NTLM auth from before but that windows auth is converted into a claim that SharePoint can use.

This change means that your userid would look something like this:

i:0#.w|contoso\chris

instead of this:

contoso\chris

Sometimes when calling other services, you need the windows userid and not the claim userid.  So for these instances, I’ve created a few helper methods.

//Regex needs more testing
public const string CLAIMS_REGEX = @"(?<IdentityClaim>[ic])?:?0(?<ClaimType>.)(?<ClaimValueType>.)(?<AuthMode>[wstmrfc])(\|(?<OriginalIssuer>[^\|]*))?(\|(?<ClaimValue>.*))";
 
public static string GetAdUserIdForClaim(string login)
{
    string userName = login;
 
    foreach (Match m in Regex.Matches(login, CLAIMS_REGEX, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))
	{
		try
		{
			if (m.Groups["AuthMode"].Captures[0].Value.ToLower() == "w")
			{
				userName = m.Groups["ClaimValue"].Captures[0].Value;
			}
		}
		catch { }
	}
    return userName;
}
 
public static string GetClaimForAdUserId(string login)
{
    string userName = login;
    SPClaimProviderManager mgr = SPClaimProviderManager.Local;
    if (mgr == null) return userName;
 
    SPClaim claim = new SPClaim(SPClaimTypes.UserLogonName, login, "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string", SPOriginalIssuers.Format(SPOriginalIssuerType.Windows));
    userName = mgr.EncodeClaim(claim);
 
    return userName;
}
 
public static bool IsLoginClaims(string login)
{
    Regex re = new Regex(CLAIMS_REGEX, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
    return re.IsMatch(login);
}

First I made a regular expression to identify the different pieces of a claim (see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13921.sharepoint-2013-and-sharepoint-2010-claims-encoding.aspx).  This allows me to effectively parse the claim for the windows login name (see GetAdUserIdForClaim).  This also allows me to validate whether a string is a claim or not (see IsLoginClaims).

Update 01-22-2015:

After some more usage, I found that I was being too limiting in the Claim Types and Claim Value Types in my regex.  I had based the options from the technet article above but I then ran into some other Claim Types when doing some work recently that were not in that article.  I then found this page:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/scicoria/archive/2011/06/30/identity-claims-encoding-for-sharepoint.aspx which listed a lot more than the technet article.  It also now seems that almost any value could be there in the future.  Because of this I changed the regex in the code above to allow any value in those two fields.

7 Replies to “Getting Active Directory UserId from Windows Claim in SharePoint 2013”

  1. How do I search for a user with his/her user name in the claims authentication enabled site?

    As of now, for classic mode authentication site, we use CAML query to search a user in Userinfo table.

    For claims authentication enabled site, we need to pass identity claims encoding type information(e.g. i:0#.w or i:0#.f|fba|) along with the user name to get the user. Either I have to append the encoding information to the user name, before passing it to CAML query or I have to find an alternate way for search.

    Information available with me are

    Web application id
    Zone
    Type of search [e.g. username, email, etc.]

    Based on the available information, how do I get the identity claims encoding information?

    (Or)

    Do we have any user control (like people picker), in which we will set the web application id , site URL, search text and it will return the users with their provider information?

  2. I would use my method above called GetClaimForAdUserId. This method takes a standard ad login (domain\username) and will convert it into the proper windows claim (i:0#.w|domain\username) that you can use to lookup in the userinfolist.

    • I have created a site collection which is having claim based authentication enabled.
      I wanted to give permission to AD users to the site collection.

      After converting loginName (DOMAIN\UserName) to a claim I tried to add user as below but getting “Sorry, this site hasn’t been shared with you.” error.

      SPUserCollection users = spSite.RootWeb.SiteUsers;

      users.Add(loginName, email, name, notes);

      Am I missing something here ?

  3. AD login can also be retrieved by this function – SPClaimProviderManager.Local.ConvertClaimToIdentifier – passing the encoded claim as parameter.

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