Grouper Developers Forum

[Nathan Kopp <>]

In my organization we are intending to create a provisioning connector (similar to LDAPPC) that will connect to Oracle’s Siebel CRM product.

 

A potentially good starting point that I’ve discovered is the EsbConsumer, which implements ChangeLogConsumerBase.  In fact, this code looks like it could be easily extended to create a very easy provisioning connector.  Most of the “scaffolding” functionality is built into EsbConsumer, to the extent that a developer only needs to create a “publisher” (a subclass of EsbListenerBase) and then configure it in grouper-loader.properties.

 

However, there’s one major drawback: the EsbListenerBase abstract class defines the “dispatchEvent” event method as taking a JSON string parameter.  I think it would be much more effective if the API instead accepted a single EsbEvent  object as the parameter of the “dispatchEvent” method.  This would then turn EsbConsumer into a generic provisioning connector (which would probably mean it could be renamed).

 

We actually have made these modifications for our implementation, and we’d love to share them with the community if you think they would be beneficial.

 

Also, what are your thoughts regarding using the change log in this way for provisioning access based on group membership.  Is this a reliable method?  For others using this method, do you find it necessary to periodically compare group membership within Grouper with the corresponding data in the external system to make sure that they are still consistent?

 

I also noticed the discussion about Real-Time Provisioning in the latest community call minutes.  Looks like a lot of these kinds of issues are being discussed already, which his very encouraging!

 

Nathan Kopp

Applications Strategist

Information Technology Group

Campus Crusade for Christ, Int’l

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