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Author: K P Rajesh

Introduction:

The eDirectory browser view in IDM Designer can be used to browse through the objects in any of the eDirectory trees running on any platform. The view provides the dialog to pass the treeName/IP address and user credentials to login to the remote eDirectory server. After a successful login the eDirectory objects are displayed in a hierarchical tree format. The tree can be browsed by expanding/collapsing the containers which fetches the objects from the remote server.

The remote operations mentioned above can take indefinite amount of time based on the connectivity/bandwidth such as VPN, LAN, the number of objects in a container, etc.. As per the implementation in IDM Designer 3.0.1 and earlier, the whole view runs on the main UI thread of the Designer and when a remote operation is in progress, the other Designer views/editors are blocked from being used to perform any tasks.

New behavior:

The solution is to background the remote operations by creating separate jobs(threads) which runs in parallel to the UI thread and thus making it non-blocking.

As per the new implementation changes in IDM Designer 3.5, there are two additional threads created during any remote operations. One for the remote operation as such and the other to monitor the remote thread and update the UI after the completion of the remote job.

After invoking the eDirectory browser view for login to the remote server, a thread is created which does the connect and another thread is created to monitor the completion and once it connects to the remote server the tree [root] and it's top level container are displayed in the tree viewer.

And when any container is expanded in the tree viewer, a remote thread is created which fetches the container objects and a following thread which monitors the remote operation and updates the tree viewer with the container objects after it's completion.

While a remote operation is in progress in the eDirectory browser, the mouse cursor is of wait type while it is the normal cursor in the other views/editors. And if we click on any part of the tree viewer a message is displayed stating a remote operation is in progress. Also a progress bar on the tree viewer is displayed to indicate it's busy status when some remote operation is in progress.

How were they being managed before?

Prior to Designer for Identity Manager 3.5, the user had to wait until the container expansion is complete before being able to use the other views in the Designer.

Conclusion

From Designer for Identity Manager 3.5 onwards, while you use the Manage eDirectory View to connect and browse the objects in the Identity Vault, you could perform other tasks in Designer while the eDirectory tree objects are fetched and displayed.

Click here to download Designer 3.5

Screen Shots:

FIG1: Example indicating Import operation running while the eDirectory browser is busy expanding a container.

Click to view.

FIG2: While the Import operation is being started the eDirectory browser operation has completed it's execution in the background.

Click to view.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.