Saves time and frustration with WYSIWYG editing of RCDCs. No more editing unforgiving XML!
Bonus in the form of a resultant rights evaluator – how else can you test portal security?
If you are developing a MIM project that includes the portal, you need the RCDC Editor tool. RCDCs are difficult to edit and this tool gives you a GUI-based method of editing the XML. Plus, the RCDC Editor has another trick – it allows you to evaluate resultant rights.
The MIM portal is highly configurable – in particular it allows you to extend the schema and to modify the forms used for data input. These forms are called Resource Control Display Configurations, RCDCs, and there is one for creating users, one for editing users, one for viewing users, one for editing groups, and so on. In fact there are more than 30 out-of-the-box RCDCs, and you can create your own, to go with any new schema objects you may have created.
The trouble is that RCDCs are not easy to edit. They are held in an XML format, and the editing cycle generally goes like this:
Export XML
Edit XML
Save XML
Import XML
Perform an IIS Reset
Use RCDC & find it won’t load because of a syntax or conceptual error
Return to step 2 and try to work out what went wrong!
To do this effectively means learning how it works, and not making any mistakes! This wastes hours of valuable development time – and these hours add up to days on a typical project. And the associated stress is bad for your blood pressure!
The RCDC Editor tool for MIM gives you a GUI-based method of editing the XML. It guides you to sensible layouts and usages, and as far as practicable it won’t save a configuration unless it is usable, and so you will find you can rapidly create and modify RCDCs, and save huge amounts of time and keep your blood pressure at a level that will keep your doctor happy.
Watch a quick overview of the RCDC editor:
Resultant Rights
The RCDC Editor has another trick – it allows you to evaluate resultant rights. For example, suppose you have a number of Policies giving Read and Modify rights to different Requestors in respect of different User Resources (or any resources). The behavior of the RCDC depends on:
The Requestor – e.g. are they “administrator”, someone in the HR set, or just any old user?
The Target – e.g. is it “self”, “other user”, administrator” etc.
There is no simple way of finding out which attributes can be read, read and modified, or maybe just modified in each case (“just modified” is not usually helpful, and so it is also interesting to know about). At least there wasn’t a simple way – until now! This is exactly what you can do with the Resultant Rights feature.
About the RCDC editor in more detail:
About the free trial tool Our trial tool runs with reduced functionality. It won’t let you copy the change configuration until you pay for a license. After you’ve downloaded, installed and tested it, to unlock its complete functionality, you must pay for a full licence. If you have done our MIM Expert course, you get a 25% discount. Call us if this is the case.
About licensing Licensing is per MIM implementation, but applies to all instances. So for example, you might have development, test and production environments – that’s one license. If you manage another production implementation at another customer or site – that’s another license.
Buying a license Pay for the license on this page (see big pink button above) then follow the instructions in your installation’s help file to generate a licence request. We will respond to your licence request as swiftly as we can usually a matter of hours, within normal business hours.
