Advantages / Disadvantages of Linking / Assigning

[lfinch <An...@CereCore.net>]

New Syncope admin, could someone help me understand the advantages /
disadvantages of enabling links or assignments between external resource
object and Syncope objects?  Thank you!



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Re: Advantages / Disadvantages of Linking / Assigning

[lfinch <An...@CereCore.net>]

Yes, thank you, that's exactly the information I was seeking.  Thank you!

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Re: Advantages / Disadvantages of Linking / Assigning

[Francesco Chicchiriccò <il...@apache.org>]

On 16/05/19 20:33, lfinch wrote:
> New Syncope admin, could someone help me understand the advantages /
> disadvantages of enabling links or assignments between external resource
> object and Syncope objects?  Thank you!

Hi,
when you *assign* an External Resource to an User (or a Group, or an Any 
Object), you are enabling _automatic_ provisioning: User create, update 
and delete on Syncope will potentially trigger a Propagation for the 
corresponding action (create / update / delete) on the given Resource.

Note that I say "potentially" because (1)  a mapping for the USER type 
must exist in the given Resource and (2) for update, one or more of the 
mapped attributes should be modified - otherwise, no propagation will be 
generated and executed.
More at [1].

When you *link* an External Resource to an User, you are simply 
establishing an association between that User and the given External 
Resource, which does not trigger any Propagation at the moment; only 
future changes to that User might potentially (see above) trigger 
Propagations.

Moreover, consider that linking can be configured only during Pull [2], 
e.g. when "importing" Users from External Resources, while assignment is 
what normally happens when User is created / updated / deleted via REST.

Finally, an alternative to such two options is Push [3], where there is 
no relationship at all between User and External Resource, hence there 
is no automatic provisioning; still, you have option to manually send 
bulk create or update of a subset of Users onto a given Resource - 
that's _manual_ provisioning, instead.

Hope this clarifies.
Regards.

[1] http://syncope.apache.org/docs/reference-guide.html#propagation
[2] http://syncope.apache.org/docs/reference-guide.html#provisioning-pull
[3] http://syncope.apache.org/docs/reference-guide.html#policies-push

-- 
Francesco Chicchiriccò

Tirasa - Open Source Excellence
http://www.tirasa.net/

Member at The Apache Software Foundation
Syncope, Cocoon, Olingo, CXF, OpenJPA, PonyMail
http://home.apache.org/~ilgrosso/