Identity Cloud

Groups

Groups may not be enabled in your tenant. To check if groups are enabled, from the Identity Cloud admin UI, go to Identities > Manage. If Alpha realm - Groups is present, then groups are enabled.

If this is not present, enable groups using the Feature enablement endpoint.

If you previously used AM static groups, submit a ForgeRock Support ticket for guidance on how to migrate group membership to managed groups.

Groups are an important tool for identity management because they simplify managing collections of users by applying permissions and authorizations to all members of a group rather than to individual users. Groups may follow an organization structure or be based on the needs and privileges of an arbitrary set of users.

The managed group object is a default managed object type and is defined like any other managed object type. Managed groups simplify management by using common groups across the entire platform.

Users are made members of groups through the relationships mechanism. You should understand how relationships work before you read about IDM groups.

A group can be assigned to a user manually, as a static value of the user’s groups attribute, or dynamically, as a result of a condition or script. For example, a user might be assigned to a group such as sales dynamically, if that user is in the sales organization.

A user’s groups attribute takes an array of references as a value, where the references point to the managed groups. For example, if user bjensen has been assigned to two groups (employees and supervisors), the value of bjensen’s groups attribute would look something like the following:

"groups": [
  {
    "_ref": "managed/realm-name_group/employees",
    "_refResourceCollection": "managed/realm-name_group",
    "_refResourceId": "employees",
    "_refProperties": {
      "_id": "38a23ddc-1345-48d6-b753-ad97f472a90e",
      "_rev": "ae6e63c4-94f5-463b-8bef-7a359b8e3004-1692"
    }
  },
  {
    "_ref": "managed/realm-name_group/supervisors",
    "_refResourceCollection": "managed/realm-name_group",
    "_refResourceId": "supervisors",
    "_refProperties": {
      "_id": "0fabd212-f0c2-4d91-91f2-2b211bb58e89",
      "_rev": "ae6e63c4-94f5-463b-8bef-7a359b8e3004-1974"
    }
  }
]
We recommend you use managed objects for all data management in Identity Cloud. While managed groups display in the AM admin UI and can serve the same function as a static group created in AM, they are not the same. A managed group supports dynamic, conditional membership you can leverage in other parts of Identity Cloud.

The _refResourceCollection is the container that holds the group. The _refResourceId is the ID of the group. The _ref property is a resource path derived from the _refResourceCollection and the URL-encoded _refResourceId. _refProperties provides more information about the relationship.

In most cases, Identity Cloud uses UUIDs as the _id for managed objects. Managed groups are an exception: the _id and name properties should match.

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