Persistent Object Identification

Persistent objects are identified by the following pieces of information.

• A Type object that specifies a repository storage type.

• A String that specifies the object’s unique repository ID or repository name.

Service Provider uses the IDMXUser object type. Its corresponding static Type instance is Type.IDMX_USER.

A unique repository ID is generated by the system and may be used programmatically, but it is normally not intelligible to an end-user. Once assigned, the repository ID cannot be changed. The format of the identifier is considered unspecified, and the application should make no assumptions about the characters it contains. Note that the ID might contain fragments of a DN, but this DN does not necessarily match the actual DN of the object.

The repository name is specified by the user. When displaying the name of a persistent object in a UI application, you should always display the name rather than the ID. The object name is guaranteed to be unique among the objects of the same type, but is not necessarily unique among objects of different types. Object names may be changed.

Because object names can change, it is generally more reliable for an application to use repository IDs, if they are available. For interactive applications, this may not be possible if the names are being entered by the user. For this reason, the LighthouseContext methods will accept either an identifier or a name.