0
Completed

Review SharePoint fixed schemas

Tony Sheehy 12 years ago in UNIFYBroker/Microsoft SharePoint updated by anonymous 8 years ago 4

As per our discussion - the SharePoint2010UserProfileConnector and 2007 User Profile connector requires an account field to be the first key for ModifyAnchor to work.

A determination should be made about whether the AccountName field in SharePoint can change, and if so whether the current field name can be retrieved.

This raises a question about the concrete requirements for a fixed schema in a larger sense, and what a fixed schema is event meant to be.

There are a number of ways of potentially thinking about fixed schemas:

e.g.

  • A fixed schema field is a field that cannot be changed from a concrete/constant field defined in IDB
  • A fixed schema field is a field that must be present, and needs to be requested from the target identity management store.
  • A fixed schema field is a field which must be a key or must have a name, or must be readonly etc., but all other values can change
  • A fixed schema field is there to help, and that takes precedence over whether it doesn't necessarily need to be in the schema (but will always be in the target store).

etc. etc.

2007 User Profile, and likely any connectors with field requirements in modify anchor behaviour (eg. ViewDS, TAM) also fall under this category.

The Org Profile connector also introduces a special case here where it requires two fields (non-keys), whose names are determined by the user during configuration of the connector. It is currently up to the implementer to ensure these are present. If the fixed schema provider was extended here to take these field names and ensure they are present (they do not currently have a type restriction, either), the impact of updating these fields in the configuration later on would need to be accounted for (eg. if the fixed schema updates, what are the impacts on the adapter and transformations?).

Please also look at the SharePoint list connector. It may have to have the Modified field include in the fixed schema. It doesn't have to be there, but without it, it is unable to do sync imports.

SharePoint list Modified is unchangeable by the user, as is the case with user profile AccountName. These could therefore safely be added to the fixed schema.

AccountName field added to the fixed schema for the user profile connectors (2007 and 2010). Modified was not added to list because it is not a present field in 2010. Issue resolved, please confirm with the next build of connectors.