Package com.ibm.itim.mail

Provides a framework and an application programming interface for notification (mail).

See:
          Description

Interface Summary
NotificationFactory NotificationFactory is a factory interface for creating NotificationMessages.
 

Class Summary
MailManager Delivers notification messages to the specified recipients.
NotificationManager Generates messages and delivers them based on a category of notification and the context of the situation causing the notification.
NotificationMessage Represents an email message with recipients, subject, a plain text message, and an optional HTML message.
 

Package com.ibm.itim.mail Description

Provides a framework and an application programming interface for notification (mail). The mail extensible framework and API has been developed to satisfy the goal of customizing the content, format, and recipients of notifications the platform sends during its execution.

The java-based framework that satisfies these goals is called by the provisioning platform at any time it needs to send a notification to a user. The interface used by the platform is abstracted so that any custom extensions would be hidden, and therefore the presence of these extensions will have no impact on the overall design of the platform itself.

There are two primary audiences, or types of clients, that will use this API. One type of client will make notification requests to the framework, like the provisioning platform. The other type of client will extend the framework to customize how the notification messages are constructed. In the interest of limiting the amount of education each of these audiences may require, the Mail API will be described in two smaller pieces. The Mail Client API will focus on making notification requests. The Mail Provider API will focus on implementing the notification requests.

Client API Description

The Mail Client API is very focused on just asking for a notification to be sent, and therefore, is very simple in nature. There are two levels of abstraction this API provides for clients with different purposes to choose from. One level of abstraction is providing the very primitive function of sending a pre-constructed message. The message is represented by the NotificationMessage class. The interface for delivering this message is provided by the MailManager class.

The second level of abstraction enables the transparency of what NotificationMessage will be constructed and sent based on a category of the notification and some current environment context. The interface for doing this is provided by the NotificationManager class. How the NotificationManager determines the correct message to deliver is determined by the framework described in the Provider portion of the API described below.

Provider API Description

The purpose of the Provider API is to allow custom extensions to the Mail framework. A client attempting to deliver a notification will not use this portion of the API, but instead, a client that wishes to override the behavior of the system when other clients attempt to deliver notifications will use this portion.

The Mail framework consists of the NotificationManager and NotificationMessage mentioned in the Client API, as well as the NotificationFactory. The NotificationFactory is an interface that can be implemented by clients who wish to employ their own algorithms for creating NotificationMessages based on situational context provided by the NotificationManager. This may include formatting, context based message content generation, and possibly dynamic recipient designation.

As mentioned previously, the NotificationManager shields the notification requestor from how the messages are created. This is done by the NotificationManager selecting the correct NotificationFactory implementation for a given notification category. The NotificationManager bases its selection on properties found in the enRole.properties file. The snippet below from the enRole.properties file shows an example of the NotificationFactory classes registered for workflow-based categories.

    enrole.workflow.notification.activitytimeout=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.ActivityTimeoutNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.processtimeout=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.ProcessTimeoutNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.processcomplete=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.ProcessCompleteNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.pendingwork=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.PendingWorkNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.newaccount=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.NewAccountNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.newpassword=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.NewPasswordNotification
    enrole.workflow.notification.deprovision=com.ibm.itim.workflow.notification.DeprovisionNotification

Although this example shows a one-to-one correspondence between category and factory class, it is possible to reuse factory classes for more than one category.

For each category, the context object passed into the NotificationFactory object might be different. For example, for workflow-based notifications, the following is the list of context object for each workflow notification category:

ActivityTimeOut, ProcessTimeOut, ProcessComplete: WorkflowNotificationContext

PendingWork: WorkflowManualActivityContext

NewAccount: WorkflowNewAccountContext

NewPassword: WorkflowNewPasswordContext

Deprovision: WorkflowDeProvisionContext



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