[Freeipa-users] inserting users via java

[Timothy Worman]

Thanks everyone for the input.

I do agree that I don’t like the sound of option 1. I don’t want to be sending CLI commands from a remote host. And option 3 sounds sounds a bit brittle to me. 

2 sounds like the most solid option available right now. I like the fact that there’s an existing/working API there. I’ll need to look into converting my objects into json.

This area honestly seems like one of the weakest aspects of freeipa. There really needs to be a way to push known person entities into the directory easily. I would be willing to test option 4 if that is where the future is headed.

Tim

> On Mar 24, 2015, at 12:58 AM, Martin Kosek <mkosek at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On 03/24/2015 01:29 AM, Dmitri Pal wrote:
>> On 03/23/2015 05:56 PM, Timothy Worman wrote:
>>> I have an existing web app built with java/WebObjects that currently handles
>>> some user/groups tasks with our current directory server (Open Directory). We
>>> are investigating a move to FreeIPA for our directory services.
>>> 
>>> Just in mucking around, I’ve found that if I try to insert a new user
>>> (inetOrgPerson) into into IPA’s implementation, the new user does not inherit
>>> all the object classes it should. It only inherits the ones leading to
>>> inetOrgPerson. This does result in a successful inetOrgPerson insertion, but
>>> that user record does not show up in the Web GUI management tools.
>>> 
>>> Usually, I have focused on inetOrgPerson because that is where the bulk of
>>> the info about a user lives.
>>> 
>>> We have a SQL database that contains people in our organization (used by
>>> other services), so, we need to be able to leverage that and push users into
>>> IPA when appropriate and we have an existing app to do this.
>>> 
>>> Tim W
>>> 
>> You have several options:
>> 1) Call ipa CLI from your application - this is possible right now (but not
>> quite nice)
>> 2) Call ipa JSON API from your application - this is not supported but
>> possible. We use python API. You can do it in Java but it will be a lot of work.
>> 3) Use more elaborate LDAP add commands (with all the object classes needed for
>> users). Hard, but doable.
>> 4) Help us with testing the upcoming feature
>> http://www.freeipa.org/page/V4/User_Life-Cycle_Management that would allow
>> creating users via simple ldap command in a staging area and them moving them
>> to normal users area with automatic creation of missing attributes by means of
>> a cron job.
>> 
>> I would vote for 1) as a temp solution and 4) as a longer term one.
> 
> I do not fully agree with preferring 1) over 2). Java has libraries for
> JSON-RPC protocol, it should be pretty doable to write a call that calls the
> "user_add" command.
> 
> We are lacking proper documentation for the API, but what you can look in the
> sources or in the Web UI with and see the JSONs sent to the server, if you are
> interested in the real life examples.
> 
> Advantage of 2) over 1) is that you get the native objects (strings, arrays,
> numbers) and you do not need to parse it from CLI.
> 
> Martin