Out of the box adapters for federated repositories provide File,
LDAP, and Database adapters for your use. These adapters implement the com.ibm.wsspi.wim.Repository
software programming interface (SPI). A virtual member manager custom adapter
needs to implement the same SPI.
Developing custom adapters for federated repositories
Out
of the box adapters for federated repositories provide File, LDAP and Database
adapters for your use. All these adapters implement the com.ibm.wsspi.wim.Repository SPI.
See the com.ibm.wsspi.wim.Repository SPI for more information.
As you develop a virtual member manager custom adapter, you need to implement
the same SPI.
Custom adapters for federated repositories must not depend
on any WebSphere® Application
Server components, such as data sources and enterprise beans. These WebSphere Application
Server components require that security is initialized and enabled prior to
startup. If your implementation of custom adapters for federated repositories
needs to use data sources to connect to a database, you need to use Java™ database
connectivity (JDBC) to make the connection during server startup. Then, at
a later time, switch to using the data sources when the data source is available.
There
are examples of suggested behavior and requirements of custom adapters for
federated repositories that you can find in the sample code.
A sample custom adapter for federated repositories
A sample custom adapter implementation has been provided as an example.
The custom adapter is based on file repository. The sample source code and
class files are bundled in vmmsampleadapter.jar. The vmmsampleadapter.jar can
be downloaded at this location: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/samples/vmmsampleadapter.html.
Contents of the vmmsampleadapter.jar file are as follows:
- Class files for the sample adapter:
- com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/AbstractAdapterImpl.class
- com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/SampleFileAdapter.class
- com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/XPathHelper.class
- Source code for the sample adapter:
- src/com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/AbstractAdapterImpl.java
- src/com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/SampleFileAdapter.java
- src/com/ibm/ws/wim/adapter/sample/XPathHelper.java
Note: The sample files should not be used in the production environment.
You should make a copy of these files, rename them, and update them based
on your specific adapter implementation. Refer to the Javadoc in the source
code for more information.
- com/ibm/ws/wim/sample/adapter/AbstractAdapterImpl.java
- Provides an abstract implementation class which handles most of the repository
independent internal operations for the adapter and defines some simple abstract
methods that should be implemented by the custom adapter. For most cases,
you may not need to change this file.
- com/ibm/ws/wim/sample/adapter/SampleFileAdapter.java
- Extends from the AbstractAdapterImpl class and implements the abstracts
method. This class implements the abstract methods using file as the repository.
Adapter providers can use this class as a reference to implement these methods
specific to their adapters.
- com/ibm/ws/wim/sample/adapter/XPathHelper.java
- Defines a helper class to parse the XPath search expression and build
the search tree. This helper class also contains the method to evaluate the
search expression. If your repository supports a search expression, then you
need to convert XPath expression to an expression that your repository can
process and let your repository evaluate the expression. This helper class
evaluates the search expression based on the use of dataobjects. You can overwrite
the evaluate() method to perform the evaluation using other
objects, such as java.util.Map.
Some utility classes have been provided to help adapter providers. Most
of these utility methods are used in the sample adapter. Refer to http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.javadoc.doc/vmm/com/ibm/wsspi/wim/package-summary.html for more details.