[midPoint] How is it possible to create a new object

[Radovan Semancik]

Hi,

Yes and no ...

MidPoint philosophy is to have an handful of very generic reusable 
object types. Such as user, org, role, service. These objects can be 
used to represent almost any concept in the IDM field. E.g. role can 
represent security roles, work positions, responsiblities; org can 
represent functional organizational units (divisions, sections), but 
also projects or ad-hoc teams. Services can represent devices, servers, 
networks, etc. Each object has appropriate typing property (roleType, 
orgType, ...) that can be used to distinguish these subtypes and sill 
have very efficient data storage, scalability, etc. My estimate is that 
90% of all IDM use cases can be implemented by using this method. E.g. 
your costcenter can be modeled as a role or org in midPoint. This is 
also somehow well supported in GUI, especially for organizational units 
(not so well for roles yet).

In addition to that every focal object (user, role, org, service) can 
have assignments. Assignments represent policy-base relations between 
objects. Assignment is also an extensible data structure and it can have 
custom properties. Therefore your Employment object can be represented 
as assignment. In fact assignment already has description and 
organizational unit link. Parametric assignments like these work 
perfectly in midPoint core and we are using them is several projects. 
However they are only partially supported in GUI.

We have decided to go this way because if you base your data model on 
existing concepts you will automatically gain all the advantages that we 
have already implemented. E.g. if you base your Employment concept on 
assignment you will automatically gain ability to create new employments 
in GUI, you will be able to use authorizations to select which 
employment types are assignable by which employees (operators), they 
will be automatically considered in reconciliation code, etc. This saves 
a huge amount of customization effort.

Maybe it is just me, but I can feel the taste of one particular 
competing IDM system in this question :-) ... and that's right, midPoint 
does not have such an extreme flexibility. But we have a working GUI 
that you can just reuse and you do not need to develop a completely 
custom GUI by yourself, you do not need to reimplement the 
synchronization logic for each object type and so on. We strongly prefer 
reuse of code and concepts over reinventing everything from scratch for 
each and every deployment.

Yet, there are two more alternative ways:

Your Costcenter concept is very simple and you can implement is as a 
simple lookup table. This is reasonably well supported out-of-the-box 
although it is not well documented. So I have written a very basic 
documentation here: https://wiki.evolveum.com/display/midPoint/Lookup+Tables

Second option is to use the GenericObjectType. This object type was 
designed to cover the remaining 10% of cases. But actually it looks like 
it almost never used. I assume that the reason is that all practical 
cases can be modeled using the normal midPoint approch. And as nobody is 
asking for better GenericObjectType support then naturally the midPoint 
support for GenericObjectType is very ... minimal. It should work well 
in midPoint core, however it is not very well tested and it is not 
supported in the GUI at all.

I would strongly recommend to use the common midPoint approach, model 
your Employment as an assignment, model your Costcenter as a lookup 
table or a role. If there are some parts that you are missing in 
midPoint GUI we will be happy to implement them given the right 
motivations. I would recommend you to secure appropriate subscription 
which can cover the development of the missing part. Or maybe to sponsor 
the missing features or to develop them yourself and contribute them.

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com



On 06/23/2016 04:17 PM, Andreas Küstner wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> is it possible to create a new object like this:
>
> Object: Employment
>    - Attribute: employee_number : String
>    - Attribute: description: String
>    - Reference to: organisation_unit : Link
>    - Reference to: sub_organisation_unit : Link
>    - Reference to: costcenter : Link
>
> Object: Costcenter
>    - Attribute: costcenter_number : String
>    - Attribute: description : String
>
> ...
>
>
> and to show these Object in the webui?
>
> I know it is mentioned in the wiki here: ->
> https://wiki.evolveum.com/display/midPoint/Repository+Subsystem
> (Creating New Objects)
>
> and here:
> https://wiki.evolveum.com/display/midPoint/Data+Model#DataModel-GenericObject
>
> Do i have to create the xsd-schemas?
> If i create such an object will it be sychronizable to other resources
> (via mapping)?
> Is there a sample for this?
>
> Thanks for help!
>
> Andy
>
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