UMRA – Active Directory Export to XML SOA

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If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – Active Directory Export to XML SOA

This blog will be a little different then my previous blogs, this blog will focus on how most applications today are now moving towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). What is this you might be asking? I bet in some way shape or form one of your current business applications is using this type of framework for data processing. So how do you use UMRA and SOA? UMRA has the ability to not only create any active directory object, it also has the ability to run reports and audits on Active Directory in real time. So for example, say if you wanted to get all users in your Active Directory and at the same time get firstname, lastname, displayname, active/disabled status, locked status, and even when there password will expire, you can do this with UMRA. It’s a widely looked over aspect of UMRA, since in most cases our UMRA scripts will create objects and compare objects in Active Directory, but not write this data to a file. Since UMRA is a very quick and lightweight application, getting this data is very fast, and in most cases two times as fast as running a VBscript, or Pearl script to obtain this information. So once you have your information you want to get, UMRA has a function called “Export Variables” this function will export your current variables to a text file, this text file can be a .csv, .txt, .xml etc. so the possibilities are endless. Once you have your xml file, or other data type, you can now use this data to process through your other SOA based application. So for example, we had a currently client who had a library system that grab an XML file that was placed in a cretin folder, and every hour it would look at the file, and take any username, lastname, firstname, etc. formatted in XML and insert those records into the library system. So when our normal UMRA PowerSchool Student Automation sync up new students into Active Directory, we were able to catch new students on a nightly basis, and write this information to this XML file. So in turn, we were able to provision different accounts into two different systems during out UMRA PowerSchool Student Automation. So I hope this helps some of you out there maybe thinking about creating your own Active Directory Audits with UMRA.

So I decided to update this blog post with some more in depth information on how to export your data to XML with UMRA, the benefits of this, and also tips of how you can do this export. Now, I hope after reading the top portion of this blog you get an idea of what SOA is all about. Plus, as you've most likely read on other websites, and software documentation many are moving towards this SOA schemea, not only for import, but for export of there data to allow easier intergration of applicaions. Now in he preious paragrah I talked about applications that you can pass your XML to, but here I will talk about how to use our UMRA extrace XML data that you kick out to applications for reporting purposes. Yes, in some cases you may want to get repors all Active Directory users last login date, or Active Directory users whos passwords never expire. What ever the report is, either do your calculations in UMRA or do your calculations on your wepage code. Once you've exported the data you need to your XML file, you can now either use a custom flash based charting grah to read in your XML data, and display it on your screen. If you dont have anyone that can create custom flash based chart, take a look online, there a few good charting applications that can integrate easily in your UMRA applications. No keep in mind that you dont need to display these XML data files on some type of visual flash chart you can just as easy display this data with pure text. In this event you can simple do calcuations on our webpage to get users or data that meets your criteria, total it, and then display it back on the webpage. Now, even to go simpler, you can just have a page that pulls the XML file directly up, however these files might be a tad hard to read depending on how much data you are pulling back, so this method is not perfered. So with that said, lets talk about some ways to speed up your XML data dumps from UMRA. One of the main tricks is to do as much processing as you can within UMRA. This will eliminate a lot of unnecessary open/close of connections to UMRA. Another tips is, to make sure our flash chart will partically load your XML data before the complete set of data is ready. So for example, if you want to get a list of all users and some of there attributes from active directory, and your doing this on 10k plus students, have your charting graph display maybe the first 200 or so records, and if the "scrolling" is actived to get the latest record in the XML file. So I hope this helps some of you out there with any problems you might be having if you are trying to this approach, and as you can see there are tons of applications you can use your XML for, or you can use it for custom audits and reporting.