1.2 How the Driver Works

The Identity Vault uses XDS, a specialized form of XML, to represent events in the Identity Vault. The Novell Identity Manager passes the XDS to the driver policy, which can consist of basic policies, DirXML Script, and the XSLT style sheets.

The following diagram illustrates the data flow between the Identity Manager and the Sungard Web service:

Figure 1-1 Sungard Banner Driver Data Flow

The schema mapping driver policy translates the Identity Vault Schema in XDS to UDCIdentity.

The Subscriber channel of the driver shim receives the XML from the driver policy and converts the UDCIdentity data from XDS format into SPML 2.0 format. The driver then encapsulates the SPML in a SOAP envelope and uses HTTP to communicate with the Web service. The hand-off between the driver shim and the application is serialized XML.

The Web service or application processes the request and returns a SOAP response to the driver shim. The shim receives the response as an array of bytes and converts it to an SPML document before passing it back to the driver policies. The Novell Identity Manager driver for Sungard Banner processes the response, converting it into XDS that is reported back to the Identity Vault.

The Publisher channel of the driver shim receives a UDCIdentity in SPML from Banner Enterprise Identity Services (BEIS) and converts the UDCIdentity data into XDS format. The driver then passes the XDS to the Identity Manager engine, where the Schema Mapping policy converts the UDCIdentity into the eDirectory schema before committing the object to eDirectory.

Identity Manager processes the change and returns a response formatted in XDS. The driver converts the response into SPML and returns it to BEIS.