Develop standalone custom registries

 

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This development provides considerable flexibility in adapting WAS security to various environments where some notion of a user registry, other than LDAP or Local OS, already exists in the operational environment.

WAS security supports the use of standalone custom registries in addition to...

...for authentication and authorization purposes. A standalone custom-implemented registry uses the UserRegistry Java interface as provided by WAS. A standalone custom-implemented registry can support virtually any type or notion of an accounts repository from a relational database, flat file, and so on.

Implementing a standalone custom registry is a software development effort. Use the methods that are defined in the UserRegistry interface to make calls to the appropriate registry to obtain user and group information. The interface defines a general set of methods for encapsulating a wide variety of registries. You can configure a standalone custom registry as the selected repository when configuring WAS security on the Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure panel.

In WAS V6.1, make sure that your implementation of the standalone custom registry does not depend on any WAS components such as data sources, EJB and JNDI. You can not have this dependency because security is initialized and enabled prior to most of the other WAS components during startup. If your previous implementation used these components, make a change that eliminates the dependency. For example, if your previous implementation used data sources to connect to a database, use DriverManager to connect to the database.

Refer to the Migrating custom user registries for more information on migrating. If your previous implementation uses data sources to connect to a database, change the implementation to use Java database connectivity (JDBC) connections. However, it is recommended that you use the new interface to implement your custom registry.

 

Procedure

  1. Implement all the methods in the interface except for the CreateCredential method, which is implemented by WAS. FileRegistrySample.java file is provided for reference.

    The sample provided is intended to familiarize you with this feature. Do not use this sample in an actual production environment.

  2. Build your implementation. To compile your code, we need...

    • app_server_install_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar
    • app_server_install_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.security.crypto_6.1.0/cryptosf.jar

    ...in your class path. For example: 

    %install_root%/java/bin/javac -classpath 
%install_root%app_server_install_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar;
%install_root%app_server_install_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.security.crypto_6.1.0
                    /cryptosf.jar your_implementation_file.java

  3. Copy the class files that are generated in the previous step to the product class path.

    The preferred location is the %install_root%/lib/ext directory. Copy these class files to all of the product process class paths.

  4. Follow the steps in Configure standalone custom registries to configure your implementation using the administrative console. This step is required to implement custom user registries.

 

What to do next

If you enable security, make sure that you complete the remaining steps:

  1. Save and synchronize the configuration and restart all of the servers.

  2. Try accessing some J2EE resources to verify that the custom registry implementation is correct.


Example: Standalone custom registries

Result.java file

UserRegistry.java files

 

Related tasks


Configure standalone custom registries
Developing extensions to the WebSphere security infrastructure

 

Related Reference


UserRegistry.java files
FileRegistrySample.java file
Standalone custom registry settings