Before You Begin

Review the information in these sections before you start developing custom adapters:

• Intended Audience

• Important Notes

• Related Documentation

Intended Audience

This chapter provides background information about resource adapter design and operation for:

• Developers who need to create custom resource adapters.

• Identity Manager administrators who are learning how the Identity Manager system works or who need to troubleshoot problems with resource adapters.

This chapter assumes that you are familiar with creating and using the built-in Identity Manager resources and that you have read the Resources chapter of Business Administrator's Guide.

Important Notes

Be sure to read the following information before trying to write custom resource adapters for Identity Manager:

• Do not create custom adapters in the com.waveset.adapter package. Instead, create custom adapters in a customer-specific package to be sure the adapter uses package-level classes and methods that are included in the supported public API. For example, use com.customer_name.adapter.

  Also, all package names must be lowercase.

• Do not use import .*. Although Java supports this mechanism, using import .* is generally considered bad practice because this mechanism

  • Obscures the actual location of referenced classes to readers

  • Can result in incorrect or ambiguous references (such as compiler errors) in certain situations following internal refactoring

  Instead, insert an explicit import statement for every referenced class or interface.

Related Documentation

In addition to the information provided in this chapter, see the following publications related to resource adapters.

Table 9–1 Related Documentation

Publication Title	Description
Resource Reference	Describes how to load and synchronize account information from a resource into Sun Identity Manager.
Business Administrator's Guide	Contains additional information about customizing and managing resources supplied by Identity Manager.

You can download these publications from http://docs.sun.com.