About the Connector Facade

Important

Connectors continue to be released outside the IDM release. For the latest documentation, refer to the ICF documentation.

An application interacts with a connector through an instance of the ConnectorFacade class. The following diagram shows the creation and configuration of the connector facade. The components shown here are described in more detail in the sections that follow.

The connector facade is instantiated and configured in the following steps:

The application creates a LocalConnectorInfoManager instance (or instances) and adds the individual connector bundles (or assemblies).

The LocalConnectorInfoManager processes these bundles or assemblies to instantiate a ConnectorInfo object.

To be processed by the connector info manager, the connector bundle or assembly must have the following characteristics:

Java Connector Bundle

The META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file must include the following entries:

ConnectorBundle-FrameworkVersion - Minimum required ICF Framework version (either 1.1, 1.4, or 1.5)

ConnectorBundle-Name - Unique name of the connector bundle

ConnectorBundle-Version - Version of the connector bundle

The combination of the ConnectorBundle-Name and the ConnectorBundle-Version must be unique.

The connector bundle JAR must contain at least one class, that has the ConnectorClass annotation and implements the Connector interface.

.NET Connector Assembly

The AssemblyInfo.cs is used to determine the bundle version, from the AssemblyVersion property.

The bundle name is derived from the Name property of the assembly. For more information, see the corresponding Microsoft documentation.

Warning

If you change the name of your assembly, you must adjust the bundleName property in your connector configuration file, accordingly.

The connector assembly DLL must contain at least one class, that has the ConnectorClassAttribute attribute and implements the Connector interface.

For each connector, the LocalConnectorInfoManager processes the MessageCatalog, which contains the localized help and description messages for the configuration, and any log or error messages for the connector.
Your application can use this information to provide additional help during the connector configuration process.
For each connector, the LocalConnectorInfoManager then processes the ConfigurationClass, to build the configuration properties for the connector.
Your application finds the connector info by its connector key. When the application has the connector info, it creates an API Configuration object that customises the following components:
- Object pool configuration
- Result handler configuration
- Configuration properties
- Timeout configuration
The API Configuration object is described in more detail in "The API Configuration Object".
The ConnectorFacade takes this customized API configuration object, determines which connector to use and how to configure it, and implements all of the ICF API operations.