Customizing the server to generate user image URIs

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The Identity Manager Server can be customized to dynamically generate the location (URI) for the user images that are shown on user cards.

Before you begin

Depending on your system customization, you might not have access to this task. Contact your system administrator to obtain access to this task, or to have someone complete it for you.

About this task

The user cards that are shown in the request access wizard can be configured to show an image that is associated with each user. The Identity Manager Server provides a plug-in that can be used to dynamically generate the location (URI) of a user image. It is based on one or more attributes of the user.

Procedure

  1. Open the enroleExtensionAttributes.properties file in the IM_HOME/data directory.
  2. Uncomment the following line in the file to enable the default plug-in. 
    person.extension.classname = com.ibm.itim.dataservices.extensions.plugins.PersonExtensionPlugin
  3. Set a value for the URI of the picture of each user.
    For example, if all your people images are stored on the web server, images.myserver.com under the /uid directory, then the configuration is as shown in the following example.
    plugin.person.erImageURI=http://images.myserver.com/uid/${uid}.jpg
    Note: Variables that refer to other attributes can be included in the URI, for example, ${uid}. The variables are replaced with the real attribute values of the user at run time.
  4. Optional: Set a value for the default URI in case you cannot do any substitution.
    For example, if the uid attribute is not set for the user, then you cannot substitute any other values. As a result, the default URI is returned.
    plugin.person.erImageURI.default=http://images.myserver.com/default.jpg
  5. When you finish your customization, save and close the property file.
  6. Log in to the Identity Manager Service Center user interface.
  7. From the Home page, click Request Access to open the Select user page.

Results

Your customization updates are shown in the user card in the Select user page with the associated picture.

What to do next

You can also write a custom plug-in that generates the picture URI for each person. See the Readme.html in the examples directory at IM_HOME/extensions/6.0/examples/dataservices for instructions about compiling the supplied example plug-in.