Setting Up Your System › Passing Auditing Information to CA IDMS › Setting the External Identity

Setting the External Identity

The user of a web-based application is typically an external user or customer who logs on to the application using an identity manager such as CA SiteMinder. The external user identity used to sign on to the web application is generally not the user ID used to access the back end database. Instead, a generic user ID associated with the application is used by all connections initiated by the application. CA IDMS Server and CA IDMS can record the external user identity in the journal when a transaction is started. This provides an end-to-end audit trail that correlates database activity with the external users who initiate each transaction.

When running in an application server managed by CA SiteMinder, the JDBC driver gets the external identity from the SiteMinder Application Server Agent when a new transaction is started. If this identity has changed since the last transaction, the driver sends it to CA IDMS.

You can set an external user identity in a standalone JDBC application using the IdmsConnection setIdentity method. You can set the external user identity in an ODBC application using the SQLSetConnectAttr function with the IDMS_ATTR_EXTERNAL_IDENTITY attribute type.

Notes:

• For more information about CA SiteMinder and CA IDMS prerequisites, see the chapter "Preparing for Installation."
• For more information about enabling identity auditing, see the chapter "JDBC Programmer Reference."
• For more information about using other identity managers, see the appendix "Properties File Information."
• For more information about driver-specific attributes, see the chapter “ODBC Programmer Reference."