Is there a way for MS Access to grab the current Active Directory user?

Question

I'm working on a spec for a piece of software for my company and as part of the auditing system I think it would be neat if there was a way to grab the current Active Directory user.

Hopefully something like:

Dim strUser as String
strUser = ActiveDirectory.User()
MsgBox "Welcome back, " & strUser

Answer 1

Try this article - I have some code at work that will erm, work if this doesn't...

Answer 2

Depending on environment variables to remain valid is a bad idea, since they can easily be changed within a user session.

Answer 3

David made a very good point about risk of using environment variables. I can only add that there may be other problems with environment variables. Just look at this actual code fragment from our 5-year old project:

Public Function CurrentWorkbenchUser() As String

    ' 2004-01-05, YM: Using Application.CurrentUser for identification of 
    ' current user is very problematic (more specifically, extremely 
    ' cumbersome to set up and administer for all users). 
    ' Therefore, as a quick fix, let's use the OS-level user's 
    ' identity instead (NB: the environment variables used below must work fine
    ' on Windows NT/2000/2003 but may not work on Windows 98/ME)
    ' CurrentWorkbenchUser = Application.CurrentUser
    '
    ' 2005-06-13, YM: Environment variables do not work in Windows 2003. 
    ' Use Windows Scripting Host (WSH) Networking object instead.
    ' CurrentWorkbenchUser = Environ("UserDomain") & "\" & Environ("UserName")
    '
    ' 2007-01-23, YM: Somewhere between 2007-01-09 and 2007-01-20, 
    ' the WshNetwork object stopped working on CONTROLLER3. 
    ' We could not find any easy way to fix that.
    ' At the same time, it turns out that environment variables 
    ' do work on Windows 2003.
    ' (Apparently, it was some weird configuration problem back in 2005: 
    ' we had only one Windows 2003 computer at that time and it was 
    ' Will's workstation).
    '
    ' In any case, at the time of this writing, 
    ' returning to environment variables 
    ' appears to be the simplest solution to the problem on CONTROLLER3.
    ' Dim wshn As New WshNetwork
    ' CurrentWorkbenchUser = wshn.UserDomain & "\" & wshn.UserName

    CurrentWorkbenchUser = Environ("USERDOMAIN") & "\" & Environ("USERNAME")

End Function

(Hmm... something seems to be wrong with StackOverflow's syntax coloring logic when it has to deal with a lot of comments. Who said that writing comments is a good thing? ;-))