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IDB5: Adapter Schema

Peter Wass (ACT Government) 9 years ago updated by Adam van Vliet 6 years ago 2

I have started testing IDB5. I have an issue where you cannot have the same attribute name on different adapters. While I can understand this if the schema is different, it will be necessary to be able to have the same schema name where the validators are the same.

Consider this example:
We have ACT Education with about 100 MAZE instances, all read through IDB.
Each MAZE will have 3 adapters (Students, Teachers, Classes)
Each adapter will have similar attributes.

This will mean that I have 200 different attributes for 'firstname', 200 for 'lastname', 300 for 'class code', etc.

This will make it nearly impossible to create the Management agent - we will have 100 firstname attributes importing to 1 firstname metaverse attribute for 2 different objects. Aternatively, we have 300 different object types in the management agent.

Further to this, it will make the writing of code immeasurably more difficult. I can either have several hundred copies of the advanced flow rules, or I can dodgy up some method where I construct the attribute at run time to retrieve from the CSEntry so I can read and write from it.

Is it possible to only enforce new names if the schema validator is different, or require the user to agree that the schema's are the same when creating the adapter, thus making it the operators responsibility to ensure that the schema is correct?

Answer

Answer

This was updated in v5.1 such that multiple schemas are supported (the setting that controls it is https://voice.unifysolutions.net/knowledge-bases/7/articles/2975-ldap-single-schema-mode).

Hi Peter Wass (ACT Government),

At the start of v5.0 development we had support for this scenario by using a subschema for each adapter. Unfortunately we ended up removing it to support FIM, which is unable to parse the element. Now that we have our own MA (which happened quite late in the development cycle) to support bulk exports, we now have the option to once again support subschema (as an option). We had also considered allowing attributes of the same configuration to be shared, but that was going to introduce too many problems so it was put off until we came up with a proper solution.

I've created IDB-1249 to track the feature.

Thanks.

Answer

This was updated in v5.1 such that multiple schemas are supported (the setting that controls it is https://voice.unifysolutions.net/knowledge-bases/7/articles/2975-ldap-single-schema-mode).