A.8 Publisher Channel XDS Templates

XDS templates are XML documents containing boilerplate and replacement tokens. XDS templates are used to generate XDS documents that are submitted to Identity Manager on the Manual Task Service driver's Publisher channel. See Templates for general information about templates.

Replacement tokens in XDS templates dictate some of the replacement data that is supplied to the Web server as data in an HTTP POST request.

For example, consider the following XDS template:

<nds>
  <input>
    <modify class-name="User" src-dn="not-applicable">
      <association>$association$</association>
      <modify-attr attr-name="roomNumber">
        <remove-all-values/>
        <add-value>
          <value>$room-number$</value>
        </add-value>
      </modify-attr>
    </modify>
  </input>
</nds>

The replacement tokens in the template dictate that the HTTP POST data must supply an association value and a room-number value.

Normally, the association value would originate in the Subscriber channel. The Subscriber channel e-mail would place association=value in the query string of the URL that is placed in the e-mail message. The Web page template used to generate the Web page when the URL is submitted to the Web server would typically place the association value in a hidden INPUT element:

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="association" VALUE="$association$"/>

Placing the association value as a hidden INPUT element causes the “association=value” pair to be submitted as part of the HTTP POST data.

The room-number value is entered in the Web page by using an INPUT element similar to the following:

<input TYPE="text" NAME="room-number" SIZE="20" MAXLENGTH="20"/>

If the manager enters 1234 and clicks Submit, the Web browser sends “room-number=1234” as part of the HTTP POST data.

The Web server then generates an <item name="association"> replacement data item and an <item name="room-number"> replacement data item that are used when processing the XDS template.

The XDS document is generated by processing the XDS template with the style sheet specified in the POST data, then the XDS document is submitted to Identity Manager on the Manual Task Service driver's Publisher channel.