Overview
Pain Point
So far so good… Generating a report file from within Rule runner task is not difficult. The file will be written on a task server on which the rule runner task ran through scheduler. Now the situation here is some customers follows a manual process wherein Ops team gets hold of that report file by raising some request ticket to a different team having access to the servers. So, the pain point here is a manual intervention is always needed to get the file available with Ops team for further consumption.
Why not enable a self-service for them?!! That would reduce a considerable number of tickets.
Solution
SailPoint IdentityIQ uses a third party framework namely JasperReport in reporting module. SailPoint community may not be right place to discuss the framework in detail. When I implemented the solution, I found this very good for beginner (even I was also beginner!!).
In a nutshell, developers need to design a JasperReport XML (JRXML in short) which contains the definition of the report i.e. what all column will be present, from where to fetch data dynamically, visual layout etc. Once JRXML is ready, the XML would need to be imported into IdentityIQ which in turn will convert the JRXML into JasperTemplate. The task result report is saved as jasperResult in IdentityIQ database. [Here I made my first mistake when started with this as when I looked in the debug page, it shows JasperTemplate, not JasperReport. So, I thought I needed to formulate a JasperTemplate just like Workflow, Rule, and Identity object. But later I realized that was wrong!! IdentityIQ uses its own Jasper compiler to convert a JRXML to JasperTemplate. So, JRXML is your deliverable, not JasperTemplate]
The example use case to showcase Jasper reporting implementation is that there will be a task which will be responsible for generating CSV file containing all correlated identity details e.g. first name, last name etc. I know this is very simple example and people may argue that this can be implemented out of the box using IdentityIQ reporting module as well. But let me tell you the scenario for which I started my research – For one customer, we needed to automate CSV file (the files being used in delimited file connector based business applications) transfer from a FTP location into IdentityIQ task servers. To do that, we wrote a task which will securely copy the files from FTP into UNIX task servers boxes and at the same time, the task result must keep the status record per file whether transfer executed successfully or with failure (if so, what is the failure message). The result report will then be revisited to troubleshoot and resolve the failure.
Technical Deep Dive
- JRXML: CustomUserReport – JasperReport definition of the report file to be attached with the task result
- Rule: Generate User Report – This rule will prepare the data to be made available in the task result report as well as attach the report with the task result using IdentityIQ Java API
JRXML: CustomUserReport
- To start with designing a custom JasperReport for the custom task, first I copied an existing JasperReport template (AggregationResults) from debug page.
- The first place needing your attention and action is fields (<field ../> tag).Here, you need to define field reference names (mind it!! not field display names). The reference names would need to be used later to fetch data for the particular field.
- Once field reference names are declared, then column headers need to be defined (<columnHeader> tag). Here the actual column heading or field display names would need to be declared.
- Once done, then report data details would need to be configured which will tell the JasperEngine that from where data need to be fetched dynamically to populate the column values. It is done under <detail> tag in JRXML. It is done using $F{<fieldRefname>}
Rule: Generate User Report
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The first of the rule is quite straightforward. You have just write code as per your scenario to derive the data to be made available in task result report.
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The second part of the rule does the actual thing i.e. formulating JasperResult and attaching that with the task result so that the report can be downloaded from Task results page IdentityIQ
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The rule has a reusable function called generateTaskReport() which takes the report data in the form of List and does the above
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The above function uses a few unexposed IdentityIQ API to achieve the goal as stated below:
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reporting.ReportingUtil
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reporting.datasource.DelimitedFileDataSource
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reporting.datasource.TaskResultDataSource
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The rule passes a List object containing field reference names while instantiating DelimitedFileDataSource object. The names in the list MUST match with the field reference names configured in JRXML. [I made mistake here that field names I was passing was completely different from the ones present in JRXML. But no worry!! We know the right thing now!!]
The real painful portion in this implementation was to adjust row height and width. It depends on the data length and number of fields. Need to be little patient to bring the report look and feel to the intended visual layout.
Conclusion
Once all coding is done, then run the rule runner task. You would be able to see the task result report like below. The report file can be downloaded in either pdf/excel format by clicking on the icon.
