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 > Reference > Virtual member manager SPIs > Repository SPI
search
Use the search method to find entries in the profile repositories that match the search criteria.
Purpose
The search SPI searches the profile repository to get the entities which matches the search expression.A list of properties that are returned from the search is included in the SearchControl in the input data graph. A PageControl and, or, or both a SortControl can also be included in the input data graph. SearchControl in the input data graph includes the search expression string. The implementation class of the Repository API needs to parse the XPath based search expression string.
If an adapter does not support sorting. The SortControl in the input data object is ignored.
The method returns a data graph that includes all the entities that match the search expression, if the paging function is not used. For paging function, a PageResponseControl also needs to be included in the output data graph. If the number of the entities are greater than the page size, a cookie has to be returned from PageResponseControl so that it can be used in subsequent calls. If the page size is set to 0 in a subsequent call for paging search, it means the caller does not want the rest of the search results. The adapter can perform a data clean up, such as purging the cache, if necessary.
Virtual member manager does not utilize the paging function of an underlying datastore.
The uniqueName of a returned entity is the virtual member manager uniqueName, which is not always the same as the unique name in the data store. The adapter transfers the unique name of the data store to the virtual member manager uniqueName according to the configuration information of the adapter.
Parameters
root
Root data object containing the controls related to the search.
Returns
The root data object containing the entities matching the search expression.
Exceptions
- WIMException:
Signature
DataObject search(DataObject root) throws WIMException
Parent topic: Repository SPI