IdM scheduling made easy!

The blog article is based on release version 1.4.0 of the ROIABLE Scheduling add-on for SAP IdM.

SAP IdM scheduling has been one of the keys to every successful Go-live and part of any daily maintenance activities of the support team. With a dedicated calculation algorithm/database table and integrated UI, it was one of the often-used features in SAP IdM 7.2. Unfortunately, in v.8.0 only the calculation algorithm/database table made it through. The UI was dropped, and we are reaching a paradox, where old users of v.7.2 are missing it after upgrade, while brand new users on v.8.0 don’t even know about its existence.

SAP has been proactive in revealing the hidden feature in the following SAP Note - > "2729037 - How to manually maintain scheduling rules in IDM 8.0". It gives a rough idea what you have to do in order to get things running, but since it requires access to the database and dangling with SQL statements, we at ROIABLE decided to release an add-on to simplify the process of viewing and maintaining scheduling rules in SAP IdM.

As all our add-ons this one has a beautiful Fiori interface and is compatible with a large range of devices (mobiles/tablets/desktop). It is very easy to setup and does not interfere with any existing functionalities you have installed on your system. Once you deploy the package on the SAP NetWeaver server running the original SAP IdM Web Dynpro UI, you are just a few minutes away from accessing the powerful built-in features. All setup steps are documented in detail within the attached “Installation & Configuration Guide”, which is delivered with every installation package. The package itself contains also a “User Guide”, which you can provide to your end users; a “Readiness Check”, which can be used to verify the operability of the add-on after installation; and the add-on release history and terms of use. The last is a mandatory read for everyone who would like to use the add-on.

The landing page of the add-on is already revealing some important information about your SAP IdM scheduling rules, which otherwise can only be extracted from the database in text format. The rules are separated by types and each of those can be filtered depending on the criteria you are looking for. Four types of rules can be distinguished:

• After another job – this is probably the most complex of them all, where you are able to define sequences of execution for jobs;
• On demand – there is usually only one rule of that type and it has all jobs attached to it, since you can run any job on demand;
• Frequency – if you would like to run jobs on certain intervals and only on certain days of the week, then this is the type you are looking for;
• Specific time – similar to frequency, but here you pick an exact time and day of the week/month when the job runs.

As seen from the screenshot above, default rules delivered by SAP can neither be modified, nor deleted. You can do that however for all custom rules regardless of how they were created (e.g. following the SAP Note mentioned previously, via the old v.7.2 console interface or with other means) as long as they follow the same logic set by the product itself.

Keep in mind that not all rules are shown on the initial page. Only such, which are already assigned to jobs. In order to show all rules, you should enable the "Show empty rules" filter in the header bar.

Below you can find explanation about the information shown on the cards:

• For job sequence tiles

• For Specific Time, Frequency and On demand tiles

Accessing the link in the top right corner of each tile lists the jobs attached to the selected rule. Those can be searched and exported for greater convenience:

Furthermore, you can find some important information for the assigned jobs, like id, name, repository (in case of repository jobs), the job guid and the id store where the job is located. For rules different than "On demand" and "Provision" you have one additional column, which allows you to unlink a certain job from the rule and move it back to "On demand".

A filter for the rule types is available next to the search field in the header:

The display for “After another job” is a bit more sophisticated:

The graph on the right is displaying the sequence of the job execution as configured in IdM. In the above example we have a job with two options - a branch to run in case of error (red line) and a branch to be executed on success (green line). For further convenience of complicated diagrams, you can expand the view to a full screen visualization.

Apart from displaying information and editing already existing rules, you can also create new/extend existing sequences. To do that, you can use the button on the top right called  “+ Create New”. Clicking on it starts a wizard, which guides you through the needed steps to create any of the mentioned rule types:

Obviously since “On demand” is always only one in an SAP IdM system, it is excluded from the selection. While “Specific time” and “Frequency” are straightforward, the “After another job” type can become tricky if not used properly. The second step of the wizard for that type is showing a hierarchy representation of the jobs, which will be executed one after the other following different criteria defined:

The job selection is happening through a pre-defined value help, which lists all available jobs in the system. Additionally, it displays an important property – if the job was already used in another sequence:

The property is extremely important when building sequences. This is due to the fact that sequences do not have an id in the IdM database and there is no way to tell one sequence from another – they are simply identified by the jobs, which they contain. That is why also the name of the sequence in the overview screen is simply the name of the first job in it followed by a fixed text “sequence”. What does that mean in practice? If you use a job that was already part of a sequence within another sequence, it will actually load the complete chain of the selected sequence and insert it in the new sequence you are currently creating. This is depicted in the following way in the UI:

In this case the Job “10. Exec Plugin – Create Group with Membership Assignment” has been part of another sequence and picking it from the value help automatically loads its complete chain in the UI and marks it in orange color. The color is simply to raise the attention of the end user, since changing anything in this sequence will automatically overwrite the original one. For that purpose, there is an additional prompt every time you try to change an orange marked job.

The header of the add-on contains some useful links, which are explained below:

• Contact us – clicking on this button you get useful information about the authors of the add-on and contact information, as well as version information about the release you are using
• Feedback – if you would like to leave any suggestions, make comments or report bugs with regards to the add-on, you can do it here
• Terms of use – it is very important to be well aware of our “Terms of use” before installing, testing or using the product. Clicking on this button would load our “Terms of use” in PDF format
• Log out – logs out the currently logged-in user

Our add-on is available for free to everyone, who reads and agrees to the “Terms of use”. The lack of hefty price tag is not because the product lacks value. It simplifies drastically the existing processes related to IdM rules scheduling, something that any SAP IDM consultant can use for their existing/future projects. We love our SAP IdM community, so we decided to make it a gift.

In order to get the add-on installation package, you would need to fill a very short survey available here -> Request form. After that we will send a personalized link to the registered email, where you can download the add-on. Simple and easy, just like IdM Scheduler by ROIABLE!