C Identity Events

In the material on events and the custom actions that you can write to handle them, described in Chapter 3, "Identity Event Plug-in API", the code examples introduce you to several Oracle Access Manager events. What was not described is how to find out what events are available, so that you can determine the best place to insert your custom code.

An event is defined as a significant point in the life cycle of an interactive user request or workflow within Oracle Access Manager. Each Identity System application defines its own events, and Oracle Access Manager automatically generates additional events to correspond with life cycle steps in a workflow.

C.1 Application Events

Currently, only the Identity System applications generate events. To determine which Identity System application generates which events, you need to examine the application registration files within the installation. The registration files for the Identity System applications are found in the following locations:

Application	Registration File
Common to all applications	$Identity_install_dir/apps/common/bin/oblixbasereg.xml
User Manager	$Identity_install_dir/apps/userservcenter/bin/userservcenterreg.xml
Group Manager	$Identity_install_dir/apps/groupservcenter/bin/groupservcenterreg.xml
Organization Manager	$Identity_install_dir/apps/objservcenter/bin/objservcenterreg.xml

See the chapter on PresentationXML in the Oracle Access Manager Customization Guide for a discussion of how these files are used in a more general way.

In each registration file, you will find a set of XML elements named ObProgram. Each ObProgram element has a name attribute. The values of these name attributes are also the names of the events generated by the Identity System applications.

Taking userservcenterreg.xml as an example, a snippet is

...
...
<ObProgram name="view">
   <ObStyleSheet name="usc_profile.xsl" /> 
   <ObButton name="initiateDeactivateUser" /> 
   <ObButton name="userreactivate" /> 
   <ObButton name="userModify" /> 
   <ObSchema name="usc_view.xsd" /> 
</ObProgram>
...
...

Notice the ObProgram element named view. View is also an event name, in this case the name of the event that corresponds to a page being displayed when you click on the My Identity (personal profile) tab in the User Manager.

Note:

Another way to determine the name of an event, while interacting with Identity System as an end user, is to examine the URL of the page currently being displayed. You will notice in the URL query string a pattern of the form: program=xxxx. When you see this, you can tell that the page was generated as the result of an event called xxxx.

C.2 Workflow Events

In addition to application events, Oracle Access Manager generates events that you can associate with custom actions at predefined points in a workflow.

Workflow events are defined in the catalog in exactly the same way as application events. The difference is that their names are dynamically generated when the workflow steps are created. The name of a workflow event takes the following form:

<workflow>_<sequence>_<type>

where workflow is the name of the workflow, sequence is an integer representing the position of the step within the workflow, and type is either preaction or postaction.