Easy Identity

 
OpenIDM does not support bulk operations out of the box. One way to to do this, however, is to obtain a list of IDs that you want to perform an operation on and then loop through the list performing the desired operation on each ID.
 

Yes this is a hack, but let’s be honest, isn’t life just one big set of hacks when you think about it?

 
Here are the steps.

Suppose for instance that you want to delete all managed users in OpenIDM that have a last name of “Nelson”. The first step is to obtain a list of those users; which you can easily do using a cURL command and an OpenIDM filter as follows:

curl -u openidm-admin:openidm-admin 'http://localhost:8080/openidm/managed/user?_queryFilter=(sn+eq+"Nelson")&_fields=_id&_prettyPrint=true'

This returns a listing of all managed objects that match the filter as follows.

 
{
  "result" : [ {
    "_id" : "ed979deb-2da2-4fe1-a309-2b7e9677d931",
    "_rev" : "5"
  },
  {
    "_id" : "581c2e13-d7c4-4fff-95b8-2d1686ef5b9c",
    "_rev" : "1"
  },
  {
    "_id" : "1295d5db-c6f8-4108-9842-06c4cde0d4eb",
    "_rev" : "3"
  } ],
  "resultCount" : 3,
  "pagedResultsCookie" : null,
  "totalPagedResultsPolicy" : "NONE",
  "totalPagedResults" : -1,
  "remainingPagedResults" : -1
}

 
But most of the data returned is extraneous for the purposes of this exercise; we only want the “_id” values for these users and to obtain this information, you can pipe the output into a grep command and redirect the output to a file as follows:

curl -u openidm-admin:openidm-admin 'http://localhost:8080/openidm/managed/user?_queryFilter=(sn+eq+"Nelson")&_fields=_id&_prettyPrint=true' | grep "_id" >> bulkOperationIDs.txt

This will produce a file that looks like this:

 
     "_id": "ed979deb-2da2-4fe1-a309-2b7e9677d931",
     "_id": "581c2e13-d7c4-4fff-95b8-2d1686ef5b9c",
     "_id": "1295d5db-c6f8-4108-9842-06c4cde0d4eb"

 
(yes, there are leading spaces in that output).

You are still not done yet as you need to strip off all the extraneous stuff and get it down to just the values of the “_id” attribute. You can probably devise a cool sed script, or find an awesome regular expression for the grep command, but it is just as easy to simply edit the file with and perform a couple global search/replace operations:

:1,$ s/ "_id": "//g
:1,$ s/",//g

The above example demonstrates a global search/replace operation in the “vi” editor – the best damn editor on God’s green earth!

 
However you approach it, the goal is to get the file to consist of only the IDs as follows:
 

 
ed979deb-2da2-4fe1-a309-2b7e9677d931
581c2e13-d7c4-4fff-95b8-2d1686ef5b9c
1295d5db-c6f8-4108-9842-06c4cde0d4eb

 
Now that you have this file, you can perform any operation you would like on it using a simple command line script tied into the appropriate cURL command. For instance, the following would perform a GET operation on all entries in the file (it is HIGHLY recommended that you do this before jumping right into a DELETE operation):

for i in `cat bulkOperationIDs.txt`; do curl -u openidm-admin:openidm-admin -X GET "http://localhost:8080/openidm/managed/user/$i?_prettyPrint=true"; done

Once you feel comfortable with the response, you can change the GET operation to a DELETE and kick the Nelsons to the proverbial curb.