Web Services Overview
Microsoft® Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) clients can create, retrieve, update and delete objects in FIM. FIM makes this easier by providing several Web service endpoints. All calls to these endpoints are processed as requests as described in Request Processing.
Generally, the WS-Transfer: Identity Management Operations for Directory Access Extensions (WS-Transfer IMO) and the WS-Enumeration specification define how to submit requests to a Web service to manipulate data. The FIM Web service documentation defines how a service may respond to requests that follow those specifications if, before the request can be allowed to proceed, additional data for confirming the requester's identity is required, or permission has to be granted by someone else.
The FIM Web service documentation for the Enumeration Endpoint includes extensions to the WS-Enumeration specification that were implemented in order to enhance the usability of client applications. The FIM extensions to the WS-Enumeration protocol define how clients of a Web service can submit queries to the service and retrieve, in batches, collections of objects selected by the query. These extensions enhance the base functionality defined by the WS-Enumeration specification to let a client jump to a particular page and move both backward and forwards through the data.
The Resource Factory endpoint provides a Create operation to enable you to create an object in FIM.
The Resource endpoint provides a Get operation for retrieving information about resources, a Put operation for modifying resources, and a Delete operation for removing resources from FIM.
The Security Token Service endpoint provides an implementation of the operations defined in the Web Services Trust Language (WS-Trust) specification for requesting the security tokens defined in the Security Assertion Markup Language V1.1 (SAML 1.1) specification.
It is recommended that before you use the FIM Web service endpoints you read the Web services specifications mentioned earlier in this document. An introduction to how to apply those specifications is provided by Luis-Felipe Cabrera and Chris Kurt in their book Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS-*, (Microsoft Press, 2005).