LDAP connector using Orbeon and Intalio

In my business processes that I develop for customers they often want email notifications sent for alerts and or events that happen along the business process.  The user information is stored in Apache DS LDAP so the trick is getting the data in the process to be used for html emails.  I came up with a solution several months back which involved using openESB and their LDAP Binding Connector (BC) to create a composite application deployed on Glassfish Server.  The Trigger was an HTTP SOAP call which passed information to the LDAP BC and returned the desired results.

Even though this solution got the job done, you had to download openESB, develop the composite application in Netbeans, deploy the process to GlassFish Server, etc.  More tools, possibility for errors, something else to learn, something else to support and servers running just for basic LDAP information.

The product I use for Business Process workflow is Intalio.  And although they currently do not have an LDAP Connector, they do have a REST connector.  Another product I use is Orbeon xForms.  Orbeon does have the ability to query an LDAP through XML Pipe Line (XPL).  So how do these technologies get me my LDAP information into a Intalio Business Process without having to add Netbeans, openESB, Glassfish to my toolbox.  Let me share.

Orbeon page-flow controller can be called from within your browser - http://localhost:8080/orbeon/ldap/rest.  If you want to filter your LDAP response, then add the parameter to your url - http://localhost:8080/orbeon/ldap/rest?cn={value}.  In the page-flow controller, construct a page element /ldap/rest and a default submission to extract the parameter from the url.  You have to create an xml file to hold these parameters.  The submission will call the ldap.xpl file which I first pass into a xsl processor to construct the filter dynamically for the ldap process.  I pass the xsl processor output to the ldap processor filter configuration.  You can build a test case and test it from your browser.  There is your RESTful LDAP service.

So how do you integrate this with Intalio.  Well, like I said, Intalio has a REST Connector.  Take your url statement above and using Intalio REST wizard create the RESTful service in intalio.  Drop the WSDL in your process and map your elements (input parameter and response message).  You are done.  Your process will call your end point url, which will call Orbeon XPL file and return the results to Intalio.  No need to install more servers and other tools.  I just use Orbeon and Intalio.

One note, the xml returned by Orbeon is in an empty namespace.  Intalio mapper will not recognize the variable without a namespace.  So, I had to add one more layer of transformation within the Orbeon XPL file.  After the LDAP response is returned, I pass this output to one final XSL Processor and include a namespace in the root of the xsl - xmlns="http://example.com/rest".  Then when intalio gets the data, a namespace is present and you can map the results in your business process to send out emails.

Another tip is to use xsl within the process to pass html into the body of the email service so your clients get nicely formatted email messages.

If you would like assistance on integrating this solution into one of your projects contact me at http://BTMSoftwareSolutions.com.