Core Services

The core services are the heart of the resource-oriented unified object model and architecture:

Object Model

Artifacts handled by IDM are Java object representations of the JavaScript object model as defined by JSON. The object model supports interoperability and potential integration with many applications, services, and programming languages.

IDM can serialize and deserialize these structures to and from JSON as required. IDM also exposes a set of triggers and functions that you can define, in either JavaScript or Groovy, which can natively read and modify these JSON-based object model structures.

Managed Objects

A managed object is an object that represents the identity-related data managed by IDM. Managed objects are configurable, JSON-based data structures that IDM stores in its pluggable repository. The default managed object configuration includes users and roles, but you can define any kind of managed object, for example, groups or devices.

You can access managed objects over the REST interface with a query similar to the following:

curl \
--header "X-OpenIDM-Username: openidm-admin" \
--header "X-OpenIDM-Password: openidm-admin" \
--header "Accept-API-Version: resource=1.0" \
--request GET \
"http://localhost:8080/openidm/managed/..."

System Objects

System objects are pluggable representations of objects on external systems. For example, a user entry that is stored in an external LDAP directory is represented as a system object in IDM.

System objects follow the same RESTful resource-based design principles as managed objects. They can be accessed over the REST interface with a query similar to the following:

curl \
--header "X-OpenIDM-Username: openidm-admin" \
--header "X-OpenIDM-Password: openidm-admin" \
--header "Accept-API-Version: resource=1.0" \
--request GET \
"http://localhost:8080/openidm/system/..."

There is a default implementation for the ICF framework, that allows any connector object to be represented as a system object.

Mappings

Mappings define policies between source and target objects and their attributes during synchronization and reconciliation. Mappings can also define triggers for validation, customization, filtering, and transformation of source and target objects.

For more information, see Mapping Data Between Resources.

Reconciliation and Automatic Synchronization

Reconciliation enables on-demand and scheduled resource comparisons between the managed object repository and the source or target systems. Comparisons can result in different actions, depending on the mappings defined between the systems.

Automatic synchronization enables creating, updating, and deleting resources from a source to a target system, either on demand or according to a schedule.

For more information, see "Types of Synchronization".