6.9 Understanding Collectors

OpenText Identity Governance provides a large set of collector templates that contain default data and configuration settings for many common enterprise and cloud data sources. Each template can be customized to connect to associated data sources.

Every collector has the following common elements:

For more information about configuring data source collector templates, see:

Because each application might have its own format for the data that you plan to collect, you might need to transform the data during the data collection process. For example, the application might store dates as a string (20151202) that needs to be converted to the OpenText Identity Governance date format, which is the Java Date format in milliseconds. Also, an application might use field lengths that do not match the field length in OpenText Identity Governance. These variations in collected data affect your ability to use the data or merge it with data collected from other sources.

Transformation scripts may be added to any mapped data field in any data collector by clicking on the ‘{}’ icon next to the field mapping. This will expand the dialog to allow you to either upload a transformation file or paste in transformation text. If required, you can also delete a transformation script after removing all references to the script from the attribute mapping(s) that use it.

The transforms are done through Nashorn-compatible Javascript. Within the Javascript, you can access the collected value by creating a variable name inputValue. After manipulating the collected value, you can return the value to OpenText Identity Governance by assigning the value to a variable name outputValue.

The following example translates the values true and false from the connected system to active and inactive in the OpenText Identity Governance catalog.

if (inputValue == 'true') {
    outputValue = 'active';
}
else {
    outputValue = 'inactive';
}

For more information about transformations, see the Collected Data Transformations reference.

Authorized administrators can use Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) to create transformation scripts. Generative AI assists in generating JavaScript code based on natural language descriptions. OpenText Identity Governance provides general instruction regarding AI prompt format and it is included in every transformation script dialog box. Based on the field that you want to map, OpenText Identity Governance provides the input value which is not editable. However, you may choose to not use the default input value. When you enter your prompt in natural language regarding transforming the input value to an output value, OpenText Identity Governance Aviator coverts the natural language prompt to code.

You will see the following response:

analysis
To achieve the desired output of creating an email address by concatenating the first name and last name in lowercase from the given inputValue, we need to follow these steps:
1)Parse the inputValue string into separate first name and last name.
2)Prepare the email address by concatenating the first name and last name  in lower case.
3)Assign the generated email address to outputValue.

code
var vals = {};
// Assume inputValue is a scalar containing full name
var inputValue = "John Doe";
// Parse full name into first name and last name
var names = inputValue.split(" ");
var firstName = names[0].toLowerCase();
var lastName = names[1].toLowerCase();
// Generate email by concatenating first name and last name
var email = firstName + "." + lastName + "@example.com";
vals.outputValue = email;

summary 
In the provided code:
. We first assumed the inputValue is a scalar containing the full name in the format "John Doe".
. Then we split the inputValue into an array using the space character as the delimiter, assigning these values to firstName and lastName.
. Next, we convert both the first name and last name to lowercase using the toLowerCase() method.
. After that, we concatenate the firstName, ".", lastName, and the domain name to form the email address (e.g., "john.doe@example.com").
. Lastly, we assign the generated email address to the object with the key outputValue in the vals object, which can be used further as needed.

When creating, updating, or troubleshooting data collectors, you can test all or part of the collections without publishing the results to the catalog. When you test a collection, you either ensure that the collector is correctly configured, or you have the ability to change the collector configuration and quickly test again to check the results.

You can view the collected data as soon as the test collection completes, or you can download the results to view later. Results of test collections remain available in the OpenText Identity Governance database until you delete them or they expire.

When you run a test collection, you have some options for the test data:

You can more easily troubleshoot collection configuration outside your production environment by creating emulation packages for data source collectors. An emulation package contains CSV files with the raw collected data from the data source and a CSV file containing data source configuration details. Emulation packages remain available in the OpenText Identity Governance database until you delete them or they expire.

The ability to download and import collectors helps you manage your environment in several ways.

Configuring collectors can take time, and you might go through several iterations of trial and error. When you have configured a collector that achieves the results you want, you should download it and save it with your other backup files. You can also use downloaded collectors to replicate an environment, either in a test environment or to use in another office location.

You could decide that you need to change the predefined attribute mappings and value transformation policies of a template to meet your specific environment. If you find that you need to customize a collector template, rather than only editing the values in a collector, you can download and import collector templates under Configuration in OpenText Identity Governance. For more information about exporting and importing procedures and recommended order of import, see Section 30.0, Exporting and Importing.

When you download a data source, the zipped file has the name of the data source. For example, AD_Identities.zip. The files within the zipped file are generically named in English and can include the following files: