Package Specification

• Business Classes
  Business classes represent business objects stored in the Directory Service. These classes start with the "Dir" prefix. They provide means to create, retrive, store, update and delete these objects.
• Exception Classes
  Exception classes represent the possible exceptions that can be generated by this API. They are independent of the actual implementation of the Directory Service.
• Directory class
  This class represents the directory service. A user which wants to access the service must request a session to this class.
• DirectorySession class
  When a user requests a session to the directory, a DirectorySession object is given to him. Through this object the user can perform creation and retrival of the directory's business objects. The user can also check which features are supported by the Directory Service implementation being currently being used.

The actual Directory Service implementation used is independent of the API here provided. Note that possible Directory Service providers used can be LDAP (with different providers IPlanet, eDirectory, MSAD), RDBMS (e.g. Oracle) or even plain text files.

The API follows some rules that must be considered when using the classes.

• There API don't enforce any referential integrity between objects.
  For example, if you create a RoleAssignment object with an role, parameter or permission that does not exist in the directory, and assign it to a participant, FDI will store it normally.
• The creation of a DirectorySession must be considered a costly operation, that will probably allocate system resources like LDAP/Database connections, sockets, etc. If you only need to authenticate a participant, you can use the DirectorySession.authenticateParticipant method.
• This API is thead-safe considering the use of different object belonging to the same session. more to be added on this
• The FDI objects are not serializable because their existence is strongly binded to a DirectorySession, and cannot exists without it. This objects cannot be transfered between JVMs or be constructed withoud a DirectorySession
• When and FDI object contains an array, the order of the elements of the array is not persisted, so you can save an array in order XYZ and you might retrieve it ZXY.
• When a list of elements in FDI are retrieved, FDI don't handle a maximun number of elements, unless explicitly specified. This means that when fetching all roles, for example, the JVM can run out of memory if the number of roles is big enough. The only actual object that handles this condition is the Human Participant.