Develop standalone custom registries

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

WebSphere Application Server security supports the use of standalone custom registries in addition to the local operating system registry, standalone Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) registries, and federated repositories for authentication and authorization purposes. A standalone custom-implemented registry uses the UserRegistry Java interface as provided by WebSphere Application Server. 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 WebSphere Application Server security on the Secure administration, applications, and infrastructure panel.

In WebSphere Application Server V6.1, make sure that your implementation of the standalone custom registry does not depend on any WebSphere Application Server components such as data sources, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). You can not have this dependency because security is initialized and enabled prior to most of the other WebSphere Application Server 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, IBM recommends 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 WebSphere Application Server. FileRegistrySample.java file is provided for reference. Attention: 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, you need the com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar and the com.ibm.ws.security.crypto_6.1.0 files in your class path. For example:

   javac -extdirs app_server_rootBase/java/ext:/QIBM/UserData/Java400/ext:
     /QIBM/ProdData/Java400/jdk15/lib/ext:app_server_rootBase/lib
     -classpath app_server_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar:
     app_server_rootBase/plugins/com.ibm.ws.security.crypto_6.1.0
   /cryptosf.jar com/ibm/websphere/security/FileRegistrySample.java
   

3. Create a classes subdirectory in your instance for custom classes. For more information, see Creating a classes subdirectory in your profile for custom classes.

   Create the classes subdirectory for each node in the cell.

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

   The preferred location is the app_server_root/classes directory. For more information, see Creating a classes subdirectory in your profile for custom classes. Copy the class files to all the product process class paths including the cell, all of the node agents.

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

What to do next

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.

Related tasks

Related Reference