Wildcard Search Of Users Using CSOM In SharePoint

There are many ways in CSOM to get the users from SharePoint site or the web but I could not find any proper way. In this blog, I will explain how to find users using the ClientPeoplePickerSearchUser class.

In this blog, I will explain how to find users using ClientPeoplePickerSearchUser class. There are many ways in CSOM to get the users from SharePoint site or the web but I could not find any proper way to perform a wildcard search of users from SharePoint site using CSOM. For example, let's say I want to find all the users present in the site collection where the first name starts with “John” or the last name starts with “Patt”.

This below-mentioned code sample will help us to perform both wildcard and explicit search. The output will be matching the result whether it is a collection of users or a single user.

The script for this is given below.

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Security;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
namespace FindUserDetailsByPeoplepickerQuery {
    class Program {
        static void Main(string[] args) {
            string userToFind = "userToFind"; //it may be full or partial name of the user
            string webUrl = "<site url>";
            string userName = "<user name>";
            string password = "<password>";
            SecureString passWord = new SecureString();
            try {
                //creating the context of the SharePoint site
                using(ClientContext clientCtx = new ClientContext(webUrl)) {
                    foreach(char c in password.ToCharArray())
                    passWord.AppendChar(c);
                    clientCtx.Credentials = new SharePointOnlineCredentials(userName, passWord);
                    clientCtx.ExecuteQuery();
                    //preparing the search query options
                    Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.ClientPickerQuery.ClientPeoplePickerQueryParameters peoplePickerQuery = new Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.ClientPickerQuery.ClientPeoplePickerQueryParameters();
                    peoplePickerQuery.AllowEmailAddresses = true;
                    peoplePickerQuery.AllowMultipleEntities = false;
                    peoplePickerQuery.ForceClaims = false;
                    peoplePickerQuery.MaximumEntitySuggestions = 60;
                    peoplePickerQuery.PrincipalType = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Utilities.PrincipalType.All;
                    peoplePickerQuery.PrincipalSource = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Utilities.PrincipalSource.All;
                    peoplePickerQuery.QueryString = userToFind;
                    peoplePickerQuery.AllUrlZones = true;
                    peoplePickerQuery.SharePointGroupID = 0;
                    peoplePickerQuery.WebApplicationID = new Guid("00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000");
                    //Using peoplepicker webservice and searchquery getting the matched userInformations from SharePoint
                    ClientResult < String > resultData = Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.ClientPickerQuery.ClientPeoplePickerWebServiceInterface.ClientPeoplePickerSearchUser(clientCtx, peoplePickerQuery);
                    clientCtx.ExecuteQuery();
                    if (resultData != null) {
                        Object[] queryMatchesFound = (Object[]) clientCtx.ParseObjectFromJsonString(resultData.Value);
                        for (var i = 0; i < queryMatchesFound.Length; i++) {
                            try {
                                Dictionary < string, object > obj = (Dictionary < string, object > ) queryMatchesFound[i];
                                try {
                                    string loginName = obj["Key"].ToString();
                                } catch {} //this will give the loginName of the user
                                try {
                                    string email = obj["Description"].ToString();
                                } catch {} //this will give the email of the user
                                try {
                                    string Title = obj["DisplayText"].ToString();
                                } catch {} //this will give the title/DisplayName of the user
                                try {
                                    string entityType = obj["EntityType"].ToString();
                                } catch {} //this will give the type of the object whether it is a group or user
                            } catch {}
                        }
                    }
                }
            } catch {}
        }
    }
}

In this example, I am getting the values in a JSON String format. Then, I am converting it into an object and by looping the collection, we can get the required information of the users like loginname, displayname, email etc.

Conclusion

In this blog, I have explained how you can get multiple users based on wildcard search. I hope this information will help you out in a few scenarios.