Express (Distributed operating systems), v8.0 > Secure applications and their environment > Authenticate users > Select a registry or repository > Manage realms in a federated repository > Virtual member manager > Component overview
Multiple repository support
Virtual member manager enables applications to define and use more than one repository. The application can use a specific repository, a subset of a repository, multiple subsets of repositories, or a set of repositories. One application can define a different set of repositories from another.
The multiple repository support in virtual member manager provides for:
- Aggregation
- allows one or more registries to be defined for WAS security. Virtual member manager provides a User Registry implementation that is aware of the configured repositories.
- provides backward compatibility for existing applications and customer configurations with dependencies on the User Registry API and behavior.
- enables logical joining of the entries across multiple repositories when searching and retrieving entries from the repositories. For example, when searching for a sorted list of all people whose age is greater than twenty, the search is conducted for all the repositories and the results are combined and sorted before being returned to the application.
- Separation of the user population
- enables applications to define a subset of a user population to be used for operations.
- enables applications to have overlapping definitions of user populations. For example, two Portal applications running as virtual portals can service overlapping sets of users, where one portal is intended just for US and Canadian employees, and the other portal applies to all US, Canadian, and international employees.
- Management
- Enables applications to access a repository or subset of a repository that is not part of the WAS or Portal security definitions. This enables management applications to manage a repository that is not directly consumed by WAS or Portal, but still needs to be managed in a customer enterprise.
Virtual member manager uses an entry mapping adapter to support multiple repositories. To manage multiple repositories without using the entry mapping adapter :
- guarantee that all repositories under virtual member manager provide globally unique, static, and never-reused identifiers.
- not use Person and PersonAccount data objects at the same time.
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Parent topic: Component overview