The Resource endpoint of Microsoft® Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) provides operations by which client applications can request the retrieval, modification and deletion of individual objects. The operations are defined by the Microsoft WS-Transfer Extensions for Identity Management Operations Part 1: Directory Access specification (WS-Transfer IMO) and the WS-Transfer specification for requesting the retrieval, modification and deletion of individual objects by a Web service. Specifically, the Resource endpoint implements the WS-Transfer IMO version of the Get and Put operations for retrieving and modifying individual objects, and the WS-Transfer Delete operation for deleting an object.
Recall that responses to a successful request to the Resource Factory Endpoint to create an object will return a WS-Addressing endpoint with the address of the Resource endpoint and a reference property for uniquely identifying the newly-created object at that endpoint. So, in requests to the Resource endpoint to retrieve, modify or delete an individual object, clients identify the object in question using the reference properties returned by the Resource Factory endpoint. This behavior is exactly according to the WS-Transfer IMO and the WS-Transfer specification.
If the client is requesting that an object be deleted, it suffices for the client to identify the object. However, if the client wants to retrieve the data for an object, it must specify the elements of the object that it wishes to retrieve using the Identity Attribute Type 1.0 dialect defined in the Identity Attribute Type 1.0 specification. Similarly, if the client is requesting a modification to an object, it must specify the elements to be modified using the Identity Attribute Type 1.0 dialect and also provide the updated values for each of those elements.
The Resource endpoint responds to requests for retrieving the data for an object by fetching the requested data and returning that data to the client. If a client requests modifications to an object, the Resource endpoint updates the object in the data store and responds to the client to confirm that the changes have been made. If a client requests that an object be deleted, the Resource endpoint assigns the current date as its deletion date and responds to the client to confirm that the request has been processed.
The behavior of the Resource endpoint is illustrated here.
Operations
Remarks
The FIM web service only accepts UTF-8 encoding of strings and SOAP messages. Other encodings will be converted to UTF-8 if possible. If an encoding cannot be converted to UTF-8 then the web service will return wxf:InvalidRepresentationFault (see WS-Transfer Extensions for Identity Management Operations specification).