Nested Transforms for Dummies: Step-by-Step Guide #IDN101

One of the most basic things everyone needs to do in SailPoint IDN (IdentityNow) is to write transforms to create an Identity Profile for business requirements.

SailPoint has a an excellent guide on what a transforms is and detailed list of transforms available for IDN and is pretty comprehensive. 

The simple ones are pretty easy to implement. But we always run into creating complex nested transforms to achieve our goals. It looked daunting to me at first but I started to get the hang of it. I would like to explain in very basic terms how to easily achieve this.

Let’s take a business case here to explain easily.

Requirement

Build an emailPrefix attribute with firstName and lastName from Workday source which will be eventually used to generate an email address.

Logic

Now if we break down the requirement into logic, we need to do the following

• Get firstName from Workday source
• Get lastName from Workday source
• Concat the two with a period (.) in the middle
• Remove all spaces from the final value.

Since this is an emailPrefix to be used to generate an email attribute, it can’t contain spaces. There can be other requirements like special characters etc but let’s keep it simple here (that is just a matter of proper regex).

Build

Now if you look at the transforms guide you will need the following transforms

To get the attributes from a source – accountAttribute

To concat the two attribute with a period – concat

And then finally we need to do a replace block to remove all spaces from the final result (note the \\s is the put \s as literal in JSON while passing it via REST API)

Now we need to join the three block. First we will begin with replacing the “firstName code block” and “lastName code block” with the accountAttribute block we had done above.

This will give us the concatenated value of “firstName.lastName”. But now we want to remove all spaces from it as it will be used for email address generation. 

If you look at the replace block above, we need to do two additional things to the code

1. Give it an “id” key as we want to name this final transform for mapping
2. Give it an “input” key as we want to explicitly define the inputs for this type (i.e. the concatenated string) and not use implicit value (i.e. from the IDN mapping). Do read about the difference in the transform guide.

So the new skeleton code for replace will become

The final step is now pretty easy. Replace the entire input value with the built concat value above.

And that is it!! You have built your first nested transform. It gives you the immense power to build a deep nested transform for complex logics to get glorious and simplified results in the end.

Learnings

I am not an expert in this and still learning this every day even after playing with it for more than a year but here are my learnings

• Write down the logic you want to achieve
• Break it down to individual code blocks
• Write down the nested logic which will achieve you the result in best way possible (in above example = get the attributes -> concat it -> replace spaces). We could have also done this by say getting each attribute, remove spaces from them individually and then doing a concat of the final result – but this is inefficient and longer code. So understanding the logic and making it smart and short is best way forward.
• Start working from inside block to outside and encapsulating them to achieve result
• ALWAYS use a good code editor with syntax highlighter – My fav is VS Code with various plugins (makes it an awesome Swiss army knife for coders).

Hope this helped you!!!

Stay tuned for some more tips and #IDN101