Introduction

The Group Expansion connector can crawl and expand identities from the Identity Cache. The Identity Cache is part of Aspire crawl state database. Typically Elastic Search is used as a repository for crawl state database and the Identity Cache is stored in the index aspire-identitycache. The Identity Cache serves connectors as a storage for their identities like groups and users. For example we can find LDAP users and groups, Confluence users and groups etc in the Identity Cache. The purpose of Group Expansion Connector is to crawl identities for required seeds, do group expansion and publish the expanded identities. The connector also supports custom mapping configuration for selected seeds.

What is group expansion

Let us use this example. If the user User1 is part of the group Grp1 and the group Grp1 is part of the group Grp0 then the result of the group expansion is updated information for the user User1. Instead of just having the group Grp1 in the user information we will have now the list of 2 groups - Grp1, Grp0 - there. This is what expanding groups means.

What is custom mapping

Some seeds require custom mapping for key attribute names. For example we may need to map an user name coming from Confluence connector to the standard AD name. We support two kinds of mapping:

• local - we can define which  attribute name from the current identity should be used as an identity key
• external - we can define the seed and mapping attributes to fetch identities for the purpose of mapping from. This would be typically LDAP/AD seeds.

Environment and Access Requirements

Repository Support

The Group Expansion connector crawls identities from the identity cache. The Identity Cache is part of Aspire crawl state database. Typically Elastic Search is used as a repository for crawl state database and the Identity Cache is stored in the index aspire-identitycache.

Account Privileges

Not relevant here

Environment Requirements

No special requirements here

Framework and Connector Features

Framework Features

Connector Features

The Group Expansion connector has the following features:

• Seeds filtering using include and exclude lists.
• Custom mapping configuration for selected seeds

Content Crawled

The File System connector is able to crawl the following objects:

Limitations

The File System Connector has the following limitations:

• The connector does not retrieve the acls of the crawled documents.