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 Ellucian Web service:

Figure 1-1 Ellucian Banner Driver Data Flow

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

The Subscriber channel of the driver shim receives the XDS from the driver policies 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 BEIS Web service. The hand-off between the driver shim and the application is serialized XML.

BEIS processes the request and returns a SOAP encapsulated SPML response to the driver shim. The The Novell Identity Manager driver for Ellucian Banner receives the response as an array of bytes and converts it into an XDS document that is sent back to the Identity Vault.

The Publisher channel of the driver shim receives a SOAP encapsulated SPML document containing UDCIdentity from 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, encapsulates it in a SOAP envelope and returns it to BEIS.