Display Name Generation Activity - A Custom ILM2 Action Activity
I have tried in a few of my posts regarding the Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager "2" request processing model to emphasize that the Action phase can be used for a wide range of activities. ILM2 will ship with some activities to be used inside this phase of processing that may provide insight into its flexibility. I anticipate that one common use for this phase within enterprises will be to update the target of a request with additional, calculated data. To help out developers interested in this scenario, I am making available a 20 minute video where I walk you through writing a custom activity to be used in the Action phase to calculate a dynamic DisplayName for a request's target resource and update that resource with the new DisplayName value.
In what I call the DisplayNameGeneratorActivity, I have created an activity that allows administrators to configure ILM2 workflow definitions to define a resource's DisplayName attribute format using the lookup grammar available within ILM2 email templates. The activity will resolve that grammar according to a request and then update the target resource's DisplayName attribute with the result of that resolution. This allows for enterprises to define policy around a resource's DisplayName. For example, using this approach an enterprise can enforce that all Person resources managed in ILM2 will have their DisplayName attribute set to "LastName, FirstName (AccountName)".
Just as with the DisplayNameValidatorActivity walk through, after implementing the actual activity code, I continue to walk you through writing the code required to expose this activity through the ILM2 portal's workflow designer. I then walk you through the actual deployment of this new activity to an ILM2 web service. Finally, I use the ILM2 web portal to create a workflow definition including my new activity, connect it to an ManagementPolicyRule, and trigger the execution of the workflow - showing how this activity overwrites an end user's requested DisplayName with the one defined by this policy.
The concepts used in this activity will allow developers to understand how to create custom activities to be used within an ILM2 deployment for calculating dynamic attribute values for specific resources and then updating those resources within the Action phase when resources are either created or updated. As always, enjoy...
Video Length : ~20 minutes
Comments
Anonymous
November 06, 2008
PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/display-name-generation-activity-a-custom-ilm2-action-activity/Anonymous
November 27, 2008
The comment has been removedAnonymous
December 03, 2008
Thanks Erik. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to that source code (or ownership, since it is property of Microsoft). You can contact the current product team to see if they will include it as sample code in an SDK. I made the source code available to them prior to my departure.