IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator - Introduction

To start extracting information from files, directories, databases or Lotus Notes and transfer this data someplace else, see EasyETL Guide. For more control over how data is read, filtered, enriched, transformed and moved, then see below.

IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) decomposes integration tasks into three parts:

• The systems involved in the communication (data sources)
• The data flows between these systems
• The events that trigger the data flows

Besides LDAP direcories, TDI supports all major data stores, transports, protocols and APIs.

IBM TDI further accelerates development by abstracting away the technical differences between your data sources, allowing us to spend more time concentrating on the business requirements.

IBM TDI leverages Eclipses as a development environment. Integration projects result in libraries of components and business logic that can be quickly reused to address new challenges. As a result, teams across your organization can share IBM TDI assets, resulting in independent projects - even point solutions - that immediately fit into a coherently integrated and managed infrastructure.

The TDI toolset:

• The development environment, called the Configuration Editor, or 'CE' for short,
• The run-time engine, simply referred to as the Server.

We will assemble our TDI solutions with the CE, while one or more Servers are used to power them. These programs work in concert, making the user experience seamless, and even allowing us to work across platforms; for example, developing on your laptop while testing and debugging solutions running remotely on a mainframe.

Scripting in JavaScript

Scripting is done in JavaScript, and TDI includes the IBM JSEngine to provide a fast, reliable scripting environment. As a result, we will need to use and understand the core JavaScript language. There are several good online and hardcopy resources for learning JavaScript. Check the Tivoli Directory Integrator newsgroups and websites for recommendations and links.

For more information about scripting in IBM TDI, see the IBM TDI V7.1 Users Guide.

Install IBM TDI

Runs on a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows , IBM AIX , IBM System z , and a number of UNIX and Linux environments.

There are three paths of interest when installing TDI, and the installer will ask you to specify the first two:

1. The Installation Directory, where the program files are kept, along with the batch-files or scripts used to launch the various tools.

2. The Solution Directory, often abbreviated 'SolDir', which is the current folder whenever we run TDI. We will notice that the startup batch-files and scripts for the Config Editor development environment (ibmditk) and the Server (ibmdisrv) both start with a command to change directory to the Solution Directory. As a result, all relative paths used in the solution will be expanded from the Solution Directory.

3. The workspace folder. This is where the project and resource² files are kept. This will default to a folder named "workspace" in your Solution Directory.

Installing the tutorial files

The tutorial exercises require supporting data files located in the installation directory. For example...

c:/IBM/TDI/V7.1/examples/Tutorial

The 'Tutorial' directory should contain the following files:

• CreatePhoneDB.assemblyline
• index.html
• OtherPage.html
• People.csv
• PhoneNumbers.xml
• readme.txt
• Return web page.script

Copy the Tutorial folder to the Solution Directory in order to make tutorial resources more readily accessible from the CE tooling.

For example...

cd c:/IBM/TDI/V7.1/examples
cp -r Tutorial "C:/path to/TDI"

The solution directory is where project and resource files are stored.