[keycloak-dev] Sync + federation

[Bill Burke]

On 7/31/2014 7:33 AM, Marek Posolda wrote:
> Hi,
>
> at this moment I have Sync with LDAP working (one way sync for importing
> LDAP users into Keycloak). I tested with ActiveDirectory and OpenDS. On
> both I have paginated and also full/partial periodic sync working. Also
> UserFederationProvider seems to be working with Active Directory now!
>

What is the different between a partial and full sync?  Wouldn't there 
just be one background periodic sync job?


> Pedro mentioned that he will do timestamped picketlink release once we
> need it. So far all the LDAP related issues should be fixed, so I've
> asked him for doing one. Let me know if you are aware of more issues.
>
> The question is how to properly incorporate sync with current federation
> stuff? It looks that both should work together (for example if customer
> is going to write his FederationProvider to retrieve data from his DB,
> he will also likely want to sync users from same DB). Also sync process
> would likely need access to the federation configuration in
> UserFederationProviderModel, but some configuration of Sync will be
> common for all FederationProviders (For example pagination, periodic for
> full/partial sync etc). So I wonder if we can add properties like this
> directly into UserFederationProviderModel:
>
> boolean enablePagination;
> int pageSize;

Why would these ever need to be configured.  Either the provider 
supports pagination or it doesn't.



> long fullSyncPeriod;      // -1 if periodic fullSync should be disabled
> long partialSyncPeriod;   // -1 if perodic partialSync should be disabled
>

Another option is to let the UserFederationProviderFactory handle 
synchronization and be configured through keycloak-server.json.  Then 
there is no UI to do and no changes to the SPIs.

Keycloak would have a generic Job scheduler (does it already?) and in 
the UserFederationProviderFactory.init() method it would just schedule 
the appropriate jobs.


> And for Admin console UI, we can have some common template, which can be
> added into page of particular Federation Provider. For example on
> federated-ldap.html or federated-generic.html there can be checkbox on
> the bottom of the page like "enable synchronization of users" and when
> people check it, it will display other settings (pagination, period for
> full/partial sync, button for trigger sync directly from admin console etc).
>
> Also not sure how to properly incorporate it into UserFederationProvider
> API... Actually UserFederationProvider is supposed to be per-session
> component whenever Sync process may actually use more
> session/transaction lifecycles. So adding methods for sync directly into
> UserFederationProvider may not work though... I wonder if we can have
> method on UserFederationProviderFactory:
>
> UserSyncProvider getInstance(KeycloakSessionFactory sessionFactory,
> UserFederationProviderModel model);
>
> And UserSyncProvider being something like this:
>
> public interface UserSyncProvider {
>     void syncAllUsers(KeycloakSessionFactory sessionFactory,
> UserFederationProviderFactory fedFactory, String realmId,
> UserFederationProviderModel fedModel)
>     void syncChangedUsers(KeycloakSessionFactory sessionFactory,
> UserFederationProviderFactory fedFactory, String realmId,
> UserFederationProviderModel fedModel, Date lastSync);
> }


What is the difference between syncAllUsers() and syncChangedUsers()? 
Is syncAllUsers() an import/sync from LDAP to Keycloak of all users in 
LDAP store?  Is synchChangedUsers() only a synchronization from LDAP to 
Keycloak of only users that are currently imported into Keycloak?



Depending on the answers to above questions, maybe 
UserFederationProviderFactory would have the appropriate sync methods 
instead?  Then there would be one less interface that needs to be 
implemented.

UserFederationProviderFactory {

     void sync(KeycloakSessionFactory sessionFactory, String realmId, 
UserFederationProviderModel model);

}

Depending on the above answer to questions, the UI should have a manual 
sync button(s) so that the admin can trigger the sync if desired. 
Period synchronization should be OFF be default.

-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com