Active Roles Server and OIM

Why do companies love web service? Active Directory follows the LDAP v3 protocol to communicate, but no some people are hell bent on getting web service over this neat little bundle wrapped in LDAP. So here comes ARS or Active Roles Server. The server itself provides a web based console to access the users contained inside Active Directory. It has a add-on component that one has to add to enable a web service interface (follows SPMLv2), which allows us to create users via a web service. This web service follows the SPML v2 standard, but so much for just following a new standard, when a already established standard is being used and that too being light weight!

When we first started developing the Active Directory Connector, fitting in the requirements, the default OOTB connector for Active Directory 9.x was being used. I wish it was used all the way, but the client wanted us to use the Active Roles Server web service.  I never had development experience with web services so I tried experimenting with OIM11’s SPML web service. I created a client using Axis 1.x for it and it worked perfectly. But when it came to ARS (Active Roles Server), it turned out ugly.

I started with Axis 1.x , created a client but had to spend a very long time to get my head around how to send the username/password for the request. It seemed like a crazy jungle where I have no help. But I finally had some help from a few YouTube videos and I was able to get it working. My idea was to use similar steps to complete the web service client for the ARS web service, but it all turned out into waste. I tried Axis 1.x / Axis 2.x. / Apache CXF / wsimport, but ended up with new problems every time. Axis 1.x created me a request class with Object[][] data type for a tag which was like – “<attr> <data><value></value></data><data><value></value></data> </attr>”. I had no clue how to get it from a Object[][]. Axis 2.x gave me the request class correctly but the response was not getting parsed and it used to throw an error when I got the response. Finally I went to the basics to solve all this mess.

A web service is a HTTP request. Why not hand craft the XML and send it. “Sound simple enough” is what I thought. I did not want to write all the code to create XML, so after looking for some time I found a neat little library called “Simple”.  It is available from http://simple.sourceforge.net/ . It has an easy to learn Java annotation based framework which allows to generate XML is pretty easy way. An example is like this

This class when converted to XML gives us something like this

Note: the formatting was slightly modified to make the XML fit

Once we are done with the XML conversion we create a HTTP request to the web service and send the XML. Here is how we send the request:

Here are the steps in plain English:

1. We need to create a request that is of type POST. So create a instance of class HttpPost
2. We also need to set header value “SOAPAction”. This will tell the web service what method we are calling. This can be inferred by testing your webservice from SOAPUI. Alternatively you can refer to the web service WSDL and get the values.  
3.The response is again a XML formatted document which we can parse using the standard Java DOM APIs.

To complete this post with an example, I have put in a few classes which will give an idea on how to put a web service client in place. The method is a rather low tech method, and it is up to the designer/developer to choose.

Sample Code