Connector Interface

A connector is an abstraction of the end provisioning system (i.e. OpenLDAP). The connector knows how to communicate with the end provisioning system which allows the Provision Manager to control the data flow into and out of the end system. This allows the Manager to only handle provision requests while knowing nothing about the actual data stores that it is interacting with.

A base connector object handles the lowest level logic to simplify connector design. Connectors should inherit from the Connector object provided in systems, and must initialize by passing a unique name to the Connector initialization method upon instantiation. That mouthful means be sure to call Connector.__init__(self, name='ConnectorNameHere') within the custom connectors init method as shown in the example below.

Each method is optional and if a method is not implemented in the connector the Provision Manager will handle exceptions that are raised. An example of where this is useful is in interfacing with another departments data store. Our department can read their data but cannot change it; the connector really only needs get_account_info and the other methods, which write data into the end system, can be ignored.

Provision System Request (PSR)

The workflow of this systems has changed considerably and the ProvisionRequest object is likely to change in future releases to better match the needs of the system.

** The payload is request specific but is generally a dictionary of attributes:values to be updated. A provision request is given to a specific connector in one of two ways. First the service attribute of the psr matches a service provided by the connector. Second, the data attribute of the psr has a key that is the name of the connector. Thus to request info from connectors 'ConnA' and 'ConnB' the easiest way is to set psr.data to {'ConnA':1, 'ConnB':1}. The values are ignored so they can be set to anything.

bg_init

Arguments: PSR, uid is used
Returns: 2 value tuple: True/False, initialization message (errors, all's well...)

enable_account

Arguments: PSR, uid is used
Returns: True/False

disable_account

Arguments: PSR, uid is used
Returns: True/False

get_account_info

Attributes in SomeDataStore for user 'cpepe' are: uid:cpepe, job:programmer, password:myPasswordIsAwesome, phone:781-555-5634

Passwords are sensitive data and generally aren't going to be passed around, especially if they are stored in clear text. get_account_info may only return the uid, job, and phone attributes while omitting the password. It is up to the connector to expose information to the identity service.

Arguments: psr, Nothing is used
Returns: Dictionary of attributes and their current values

status should be set to systems.ENABLED, systems.DISABLED, systems.NO_ACCOUNT, or another value in the account states section of systems.py

update_account

Arguments: PSR, Data contains a dictionary of attributes and values to be updated
Returns: True/False

Example Connector

"""
Test Connector to allow nop and test actions to query a running IDM server.

@author cpepe@brandeis.edu
@date   14 July 2008
"""
import os
import time
import systems
from systems import Connector

class TestConnector(Connector):
    def __init__(self):
        Connector.__init__(self, name='TestConnector',
            configFile='/etc/identity/conf/connectors/test.conf')
    
    def bg_init(self):    
        self.status = systems.LOADED
        return True, 'Test connector loaded'
    
    def enable_account(self, psr):
        return True
    
    def disable_account(self, psr):
        return True
    
    def get_account_info(self, psr):
        """
        dummy up some information about the user that is 'stored' in the test connector
        """
        import os
        import random
        return { psr.uid : {'uid': psr.uid, 'status': systems.ENABLED, 'random': random.randint(0,100)} }
    
    def update_account(self, psr):
        if type(psr.data) is not type(dict()):
            logger.error('%s: [PSR %s] Account cannot be updated because data is in invalid format: %s' % (self.name, str(psr.id), str(psr.data)))
            return False                                  #<-- Early Return
        for key, val in psr.data.iteritems():
            print '%s: Pretending to update %s with %s' % (self.name, str(key), str(val))
        return True