You can use Access Manager as an identity provider for third-party service providers. Some of these service providers require attributes that are not part of the user store where the user is authenticated. The External Attribute Source policy enables you to retrieve attributes from external sources.
You can configure this policy with rules to retrieve the attributes. A rule can contain all conditions available for a policy. To enable this policy, you need to write a data extension class or provide a string constant value. The data extension class can be configured with constant and dynamic properties like any other policies.
For information about the structure and template of a data extension class and example code, see the The Policy Extension API in the NetIQ Access Manager 5.0 SDK Guide.