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Implementations of the PrincipalProvider Interface

Oak contains by default the following implementations of the PrincipalProvider interface:

PrincipalProviderImpl

This is the default implementation of the PrincipalProvider, which makes use of the fact that Authorizables as defined by the Jackrabbit user management API are always paired with a Principal.

The implementation is not tied to a particular user management implementation and doesn't need to be rewritten if the security setup would be configured with different implementation of UserConfiguration.

UserPrincipalProvider

The introduction of the optional UserConfiguration.getUserPrincipalProvider extension (since Oak 1.3.4) allows for an optimized variant of the default principal provider, which is reading principal information from user and group accounts using generic user management API. Note: every single user/group exposes a Principal instance through the call Authorizable.getPrincipal()

This extension allows for a provider based on implementation details of the user management implementation it is associated with, offering the ability to optimize the principal lookup and the associated overhead in terms of user/group object creation.

While the implementation is located along with the user management implementation present in Oak this provider implementation should not be considered being part of the user management API implementation.

Another benefit of this optimized implementation is the ability to specifically cache the results of the principal resolution in order to improve login performance. See section Caching Results of Principal Resolution for further details.

CompositePrincipalProvider

This implementation is a simple wrapper implementation that combines different principals from different source providers. It is used in CompositePrincipalConfiguration held by the default SecurityProvider to collect all configured/plugged principal configurations i.e. the various implementations of principal management.

Custom PrincipalProvider implementations may be used to combine principals from different source i.e. detaching principal management from the user management, where principals are backed by an existing user/group account.

ExternalGroupPrincipalProvider

Implementation of the PrincipalProvider interface that exposes external principals of type java.security.acl.Group. External refers to the fact that these principals are defined and managed by an external identity provider in contrast to the default implementation that represents principals native to the repository. This implies that the principals known and exposed by this provider implementation does not expect principals to be backed by an authorizable group. As such they can only be retrieved using Jackrabbit Principal Management API but not with User Management calls.

For performance reasons the ExternalGroupPrincipalProvider doesn't lookup principals on the IDP but relies data persisted inside the repository where the names of these external principals are synchronized based on a configurable expiration time.

See section User and Group Synchronization : The Default Implementation for additional details.

Since Oak 1.5.3