Unique property value HOWTO

Last modified 22 Apr 2021 17:31 +02:00

Table of Contents

Imagine you want to ensure that a given property value is unique within the scope of all objects in the repository. For example, let the user object have the multivalued emailAddresses extension property, and we want to ensure uniqueness of values of this property.

The schema extension should contain something like this:

<xsd:element name="emailAddresses" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
    <xsd:annotation>
        <xsd:appinfo>
            <a:indexed>true</a:indexed>            <!-- this is important! -->
            <a:displayName>Email Addresses</a:displayName>
        </xsd:appinfo>
        <xsd:documentation>
            ...
        </xsd:documentation>
    </xsd:annotation>
</xsd:element>

How to ensure value uniqueness? We will employ two midPoint features:

target-less mappings in object template,
isUniquePropertyValue function.

We will construct the following mapping in the default user template:

<mapping>
    <source>
        <path>$user/extension/emailAddresses</path>
    </source>
    <expression>
         <script>
             <relativityMode>relative</relativityMode> <!-- actually, this is the default -->
            <code>
                boolean isNew = com.evolveum.midpoint.model.common.expression.script.ScriptExpressionEvaluationContext.getThreadLocal().isEvaluateNew()
                log.info("considering emailAddress = {}, isNew = {}", emailAddresses, isNew)    // there is only one address at a time, because the evaluation mode is relative

                if (isNew &amp;&amp; emailAddresses != null) {
                    boolean unique = midpoint.isUniquePropertyValue(user, "extension/emailAddresses", emailAddresses)
                    if (!unique) {
                        throw new com.evolveum.midpoint.util.exception.PolicyViolationException("Email address " + emailAddresses + " is already used.");
                    }
                }
            </code>
        </script>
    </expression>
</mapping>

Note that there is no target for this mapping. Its sole responsibility is to check if the new email address(es) supplied are unique or not. If they are, nothing is changed. However, if they are not, an exception is thrown and the current operation (e.g. saving a user) is aborted.

If you want to see which object(s) cause the uniqueness to be lost, you can use getObjectsInConflictOnPropertyValue method:

// ...
if (isNew &amp;&amp; emailAddresses != null) {
    // last parameter of getObjectsInConflictOnPropertyValue: whether you want to see all conflicts (true) or the first one (false)
   List conflicts = midpoint.getObjectsInConflictOnPropertyValue(user, "extension/emailAddresses", emailAddresses, true)
    log.info("conflicts = {}", conflicts)
    if (!conflicts.isEmpty()) {
        throw new com.evolveum.midpoint.util.exception.PolicyViolationException("Email address " + emailAddresses + " is already used; conflicting objects = " + conflicts);
    }
}

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