PowerShell Connector Schema

Overview

The schema defines the attributes in the entities managed by the connector. As with all connectors this schema can be configured through the standard UNIFYConnect user interface; but the PowerShell connector supports the ability to request the schema from a target system. This capability is exposed through a single Schema Provider__script.

Implementation

If the schema of the entities is dynamically defined in the target system, it can be requested through a schema provider script.

A schema consists of a series of fields. Each field maintains the following properties:

• Name: The name-value of the field. (e.g. PhoneNumber, FirstName, LastName etc.)
• Type: The type of data managed by the field which can be any of the following:
  • Single Valued: boolean, binary, timestamp, date, decimal, dn, guid, int, long, double, short, single, string, complex
  • Multi-Valued: boolean.multi, timestamp.multi, date.multi, decimal.multi, dn.multi, guid.multi, int.multi, long.multi, double.multi, short.multi, single.multi, string.multi, complex.multi
• Key: Whether this field is part of the key of the connector. The key is used to uniquely identify entities of a connector.
• Read-only: Whether this field can only be read from the target system (values will not be exported)
• Required: Whether a value must be present in this field for it to be registered by UNIFYConnect.

A field can be dynamically registered in the schema provider script through the following method:

function New-Field([string]$fieldName, [string]$type, [bool]$key, [bool]$readOnly = $false, [bool]$required = $false)

Example

The following example implementation is for a hypothetical Student table. Each student has a first name, last name, email address, year level and a series of email addresses. Additionally, there is a unique identifier for each student in the database:

New-Field 'UniqueIdentifier' 'int' $true $true $true;
New-Field 'FirstName' 'string' $false $true $true;
New-Field 'LastName' 'string' $false $true $true;
New-Field 'EmailAddress' 'string' $false $false $false;
New-Field 'YearLevel' 'int' $false $false $true;
New-Field 'PhoneNumbers' 'string.multi' $false $false $false;

Registering this schema provider script will force the connector to evaluate it, and generate the subsequent schema.