The Metadirectory engine processes both manually initiated and automatically initiated synchronization requests in the same manner. The only difference in the processing of manually initiated versus automatically initiated driver synchronization requests is the starting filter time used to filter objects being considered for synchronization.
The starting filter time is used to filter objects that have modification or creation times that are older than the starting time specified in the synchronization request.
For automatically initiated driver synchronization, the starting filter time is obtained from the time stamps of cached eDirectory events. In particular, the starting filter time is the earliest time for the cached events that haven’t yet been successfully processed by the driver’s Subscriber channel.
For manually initiated driver synchronization, the default starting filter time is the earliest time in the eDirectory database. In Identity Manager 2 and Identity Manager 3, an explicit starting filter time can also be set. In DirXML 1.1a there is no facility to set the starting filter time value for synchronization when manually initiating driver synchronization.
The Metadirectory engine creates a list of objects to be synchronized on the Subscriber channel in the following manner:
It finds all objects that:
Have an entry modification time stamp greater than or equal to the starting filter time
and
Exist in the filter on the Subscriber channel.
It finds all objects that have an entry creation time stamp greater than or equal to the starting filter time.
It adds a synchronize object command to the driver cache for each unique object found that has an entry modification time stamp greater than or equal to the starting filter time and all objects and classes that are in the Subscriber filter channel in the driver being synchronized.