Programming Guides › Programming Guide for Perl › About the Policy Management API

About the Policy Management API

This section contains the following topics:

The Policy Server and the Policy Management API

Write a Script against the Policy Management API

The Policy Server and the Policy Management API

The Policy Server manages data that describes protected resources and the requirements for accessing those resources. A Policy Server also manages information about the administrators of the protected domains. This security data is located in a policy store such as LDAP.

The Policy Management API (module Netegrity::PolicyMgtAPI) lets you perform most of the Policy Server design and administration operations that you can perform with the Administrative UI. For example, you can:

Create, modify, and delete policy store objects such as domains, realms, rules, and policies
Manage administrators and user directories

In addition, the Policy Management API data management object (PolicyMgtDataMgr) lets you copy specific objects from one policy store to another, rather than an entire policy store or domain as allowed by the SiteMinder smobjexport and smobjmport tools.

Location of the Policy Management API

The Policy Management API must be installed on the machine where the target Policy Server is located. The Policy Management API cannot access a remote Policy Server. However, the policy store can be on a remote machine as long as the Policy Server is configured to point to the remote policy store.

Write a Script against the Policy Management API

When you write a script against the Policy Management API, take the following basic steps:

Reference the Policy Management API at the beginning of your script:
```
use Netegrity::PolicyMgtAPI;
```
Use the New() method to create a Policy Management API object:
```
$policymgtapi = Netegrity::PolicyMgtAPI‑>New();
```
Optionally, set one or more Policy Server initialization flags through PolicyMgtAPI methods such as DisableValidation(). By default, all initialization flags are set to 0.

Create a session with the Policy Server:

$session = $policymgtapi‑>CreateSession("userid", 
                                        "password", 
                                        "127.0.0.1" );

You can now perform operations against Policy Server objects. For example, you could retrieve and print out a list of configured agents in the Policy Server:

@agents = $session‑>GetAllAgents();
foreach $agent (@agents) {
   print "Agent Name = " . $agent‑>Name() . "\n";
}

Script Execution Performance Enhancement

You can reduce the time it takes for Policy Management scripts to make changes in the policy store. To do so, pass 0 in PreLoadCache() during initialization. By default, cache pre-loading is disabled.