Referencing Two Different Fullname Attributes

The global attribute can be used in combination with the account attribute for the same attribute name. For example, on an Active Directory resource, the structure of the fullname is lastname, firstname. But all other resources that have a fullname use firstname lastname.

The following example shows how you can reference these two fields in a form.

<Field name=’global.fullname’>
 <Expansion>
       <concat>
         <ref>global.firstname</ref><s> </s>
         <ref>global.lastname</ref>
       </concat>
 </Expansion>
</Field>
<Field name=’accounts[ActiveDir].fullname’>
 <Expansion>
       <concat>
          <ref>global.lastname</ref><s>, </s>
          <ref>global.firstname</ref>
      </concat>
   </Expansion>
</Field>

In the preceding example, creating a new user works as expected. However, when you load the user, the fullname attribute from the Active Directory resource can be used to populate the global.fullname field.

A more accurate implementation for this scenario would be to declare one resource to be the authoritative source for an attribute and create a Derivation rule such as the following:

<Field name=’global.fullname’>
 <Derivation>
       <or>
         <ref>accounts[LDAP res].fullname</ref>
         <ref>accounts[AD res].fullname</ref>
       </or>
 </Derivation>
      <concat>
          <ref>global.firstname</ref><s> </s>
          <ref>global.lastname</ref>
      </concat>
   </Expansion>
</Field>
   <Expansion>

By defining a Derivation rule, the value of the fullname attribute in the LDAP resource will be used first to populate the fullname field. If the value does not exist on LDAP, then the value will be set from the AD resource.