Policy Management Classes

Policy management classes are used by privileged system administrators to programmatically add, look up, modify, replace and delete policies, and update the policy data store, if appropriate. Attempts by non-privileged users to manage policies will result in an exception and be logged. A valid session token is required to invoke any method provided by these classes. The key policy management classes are:

• PolicyManager

• Policy

PolicyManager

com.sun.identity.policy.PolicyManager is the top-level administrator class for policy management in a specific realm. This class provides methods that enable the administrator to add, look up, modify, replace and delete policies. Only a privileged user with access to the policy data store and a valid session token can create a PolicyManager object. Some of the more widely used methods include:

getPolicyNames()

Retrieves all named policies created in the realm for which the PolicyManager object was instantiated. This method can also take a pattern (filter) as an argument.

getPolicy()

Retrieves a policy when given the policy name.

addPolicy()

Adds a policy to the realm for which the PolicyManager object was instantiated. If a policy with the same name already exists, it will be overwritten.

removePolicy()

Removes a policy from the realm for which the PolicyManager object was instantiated.

replacePolicy()

Overwrites a policy already defined in the realm for which the PolicyManager object was instantiated.

Policy

com.sun.identity.policy.Policy represents a policy definition with all its intended parts, including Rule(s), Subject(s), Condition(s), Referral(s) and Response Provider(s). The Policy object can be saved in the policy data store if the addPolicy() or replacePolicy() methods from the PolicyManager class are invoked. This class contains methods for adding, removing, replacing or retrieving any of the parts of a policy definition.