Problem

If you have an existing AS400/i5os bidirectional driver in an IDM 3.01 environment, and are planning to upgrade to IDM 3.5, there is a minor gotcha.

There was a bug in the driver concerning association values that was fixed in the 2.0 version set. This has serious consequences in an upgrade situation.

The association values in the older driver, before the bug fix was made were using the value of USRPRF, which is technically always uppercase. When the username in eDirectory is not uppercase (if it's lowercase, or even mixed case) there was a problem matching on a sync or merge. They switched the association value (DirXML-Associations) to store it as the USRPRF in lowercase. The shim also uses lowercase for all searches for that association value.

The problem arises when you have uppercase association values (which probably all your values are) during an upgrade.

Solution

In thinking about ways to resolve this, I can see that fixing it by hand is an option. Just edit the value in the vault and change the name to lowercase.

It should also be pretty easy to write a loopback driver that looks at the association value for the name of your i5os driver. It then goes through all objects with that attribute and sets the association value to lowercase.

I don't have a sample handy of this loopback driver, mostly because I am not sure how to handle a compound attribute like DirXML-Association. Otherwise, it is pretty simple.

Anyone like to contribute an example?