Building a Custom Connector Using the Sample Connector › How to Build a Custom Connector › How You Implement a Custom Connector › Sample Connector Interface Implementation

Sample Connector Interface Implementation

When you initialize the provided Sample connector, it does the following:

• Determines the names of the data files from the configuration properties and sends them to the constructor of the MockMDR instance
• Gets the configuration properties related to MockMDR
• Connects to MockMDR
• Starts an event simulation thread that periodically checks for changes in the sample-ci-changes.xml file and generates events to send to CA SOI

In response to the get() method call, the Sample connector filtering logic first reads all of the data from the XML file into memory and then applies the filter criteria to select the objects that qualify. This may not be practical for a custom connector with a very large number of objects. The connector should translate the filter into one or more native queries to directly select only the objects that satisfy the filter criteria.

The connector methods create(), update(), and delete() let CA SOI change the contents of the connector's data repository. This enables the connector's data repository to be synchronized to the reconciled entities persisted by CA Catalyst. In the Sample connector, there is only an in-memory data repository (list of CIs). The implementation of the create(), update(), and delete() methods make corresponding changes to the in-memory list of CIs.

To support the EntityChangeEventPublisher interface, the Sample connector makes use of a shared helper class to manage multiple CI change event subscribers (EntityChangeSubscriptionManager). The helper class dispatches events based on matching subscription filters.