IDN101

How to attach a rule in IdentityNow #IDN101

Happy New Year Folks!!!

Hopefully this year is better than previous and as always.. stay safe!!!

Anyone who would have worked with IDN would have used or encountered rules. They are wildly used and inevitable component of any deployment to achieve your requirements. So you must be well aware that no client, partner and in fact most of internal SailPoint PS/ES also don’t have access to deploy their rules to their tenants. These rules are reviewed by a specialist team within ES and they upload it to the tenant. There are some very good reasons for doing so due to the SaaS nature of our product and IDN architecture.

There is a lot of work being done to reduce dependency on rules and also a lot in pipeline to make this process simpler. This also does increase our own workload on tickets, review and deployment and we want to reduce it too as IDN has exploded into the world in past few years and new tenants onboarding everyday.

Current Process of Rule upload

  • Send it to SailPoint as an ES ticket. Support will forward it to ES if not as rule review is a billable task.
  • Rule review is done and uploaded to tenant.
  • Ticket is responded to and closed after confirmation.

To make this process faster and seamless do follow some best practices

  • Read the whole rule guide .
  • Run the rule validator and send us the output of it.
  • Make sure the naming convention is followed for the rule names
  • Best to keep the same structure and print of code so it’s easy to see the difference in git for us.

Once the rule has been uploaded to your tenant, there might be a need of additional steps to attach the rule to your source (depending on the type of rule). Once the rule is uploaded you will need the RuleID for some of the rules (mentioned below) to attach it to your source. Please ask the ES person for it if not already given. It will be a long random GUID. We use Postman to execute the API calls but feel free to use your choice of client.

There is a great guide written internally by Neil McGlennon but I am expanding on it.

Few common things found below

  • {ruleID}: This is the rule ID generated after rule is uploaded to your tenant. Ask ES for it if not given already
  • {Rule Name}: This is the name of your rule.
  • {id}: This is the externalID of the source you want to attach it to. It is a long GUID and NOT the shortID found in the URL. You can obtain it by few different methods but simplest is by doing a GET /cc/api/source/get/{shortSourceID} where “shortSourceID” is the ID of the source found in the URL when clicking on it in the tenant.
  • All the API calls use https://{tenantname}.api.identitynow.com/ as the URL (before /beta/…)
  • All of these examples use a PATCH for a partial source update, however PUT operations will work too, as long as the entire source object model is provided.
  • For the PATCH operations, a op key has to be provided. For new configurations this is typically set to add as our example shows, however they can be any of the following:
    • add – Add a new value to the configuration. Use this operation if this is the first time you are setting the value, i.e. it has never been configured before.
    • replace – Use this operation to change the existing value. Use this operation if you are updating the value, i.e. you want to change the configuration.
    • remove – Removes a value from the configuration. Use this operation if you want to unset a value.

Beware! Removals can be destructive if the path isn’t configured properly. This could negatively alter your source config!

Identity Attribute Rule

This rule doesn’t need to be attached via API as it can be seen via UI under Attribute Mappings

 

Account Profile Attribute Generator

This rule doesn’t need to be attached via API as it can be seen via UI under Create Profile for any source which has one.

 

Account Profile Attribute Generator (from Template)

This rule doesn’t need to be attached via API as it can be seen via UI under Create Profile for any source which has one. (as above)

Correlation Rule
Manager Correlation Rule
Before Provisioning Rule
AfterCreate, AfterModify, AfterDelete, BeforeCreate, BeforeModify, BeforeDelete Rules
Build Map Rule
JDBC Provisioning Rule
WebServiceBeforeOperation Rule
WebServiceAfterOperation Rule

 

Once any of the rule is attached, it’s ready for use immediately by the source or profile.

Hopefully this covers all rule types and if you have any issues with attaching a rule in your tenant, please feel free to reach out to me or to Support / ES team.

By Piyush Khandelwal, ago

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

By Piyush Khandelwal, ago