What are the values for the 'country' field in Active Directory?

Question

I have a feeling Windows expects 'country' to be an integer, with 0 meaning 'US'. If that's the case, what's the mapping between integers and ISO 2-letter country codes?active

Answer 1

There are three different properties that must be set in Active Directory. Each is designated in the ISO 3166 standard. The ISO website has a search tool that you can use to find the official codes. Select Country codes and hit search, then click on Officially assigned... on the left.

• c — 2 digit abbreviation (e.g. US)

  The country/region in the address of the user. The country/region is represented as a 2-character code based on ISO-3166.

• co — Country name (e.g. United States). Microsoft got really detailed on their description for this one.

  The country/region in which the user is located.

• countryCode — Numeric Id (e.g. 840)

  Specifies the country/region code for the user's language of choice. This value is not used by Windows 2000.

  Note: If you want to clear the country field, then you need to set this value to 0. You cannot set it to null or String.Empty. It will throw a DirectoryServicesCOMException stating "The server is unwilling to process the request" when you call CommitChanges() if you try to set it to anything other than an int.

  DirectoryEntry.Properties["countryCode"].Value = 0;
  

Answer 2

See this link here:

ISO 3166 Country Codes

Seems to be standard ISO 3166 country codes used in several places.

Same result from this post here: Active Directory and .NET

Point 5 reads:

5. Set user's country

To set the country property for a user was one of the tasks that took me some time to figure out. After some hours of research I realized that you need to know the ISO 3166 Codes for countries and set three properties to define a user's country: c, co, and countryCode.

Best overview that includes the elusive ISO 3166 numeric codes can be found on Wikipedia - of course! (at ISO itself, you can't seem to get those lists for free - you have to pay for the privilege....)