UUPs are composed of multiple profile types managed by a ProfileWrapper working with the ProfileManager and standard or customized EntityPropertyManager objects. The EntityPropertyManager is located in the com.bea.p13n.property package and is simply a remote interface to a Session EJB. EntityPropertyManagers provide the persistence mapping between users and their properties and are directly accessed by the PropertyManager EJB to build the UUP. Portal ships with EnterprisePropertyManagers that map persistent attributes of the Portal schema but supports extensibility by allowing Portal developers to create their own property mappings. To build a complex UUP we take advantage of this extensibility and write our own Session EJBs to handle the mapping of properties to our other data sources.

Implementation
Building the UUP is pretty straightforward. Although I introduced a complex relationship between all the classes above, in most cases we don't need to worry about customizing the UserManager or ProfileManager EJBs, which will keep things fairly simple. In fact the only thing we really need to do is to create our own Session EJB that implements the com.bea.p13n.property.EntityPropertyManager interface and register it with the UserProfileManager EJB. When creating your custom EntityPropertyManager it's a good idea to extend the existing EntityPropertyManager and not replace it. You will want to leave the default EntityPropertyManager of the UserProfileManager in place and add your own EntityPropertyManagers to supplement it. One benefit of this is that you won't have to implement every method defined in the interface, you'll simply need to worry about implementing the basic methods to retrieve the properties from your data source. In our EntityPropertyManager EJB we must create the Home Interface, Remote Interface, and implementation class. Remember that in this case the EntityPropertyManager is the Remote Interface for our EJB. There's nothing remarkable about the Home Interface and our implementation class can either extend javax.ejb.SessionBean or a convenience class: com.bea.p13n.property.internal.EntityPropertyManagerImpl. If you aren't replacing the default EntityPropertyManager you won't have to implement the following methods:

In your implementation class these methods will simply throw java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException. Regardless of whether or not you are extending or customizing the default EntityPropertyManager you will have to support the following methods:

This is where you define how the new EntityPropertyManager will connect to your data source and access user properties. Obviously this is pretty vague because it may be simple or complex depending on the type of data source you are accessing, but this is also where power and flexibility are introduced in the customization of User Profile management. One thing that should be mentioned here is that a call to any of these methods via JSP Tag Libraries or direct method invocation will result in a trip to the data source. Repetition of this is usually not a good thing so you'll want to take advantage of the property caching provided by the EntityPropertyCache. If your custom EntityPropertyManager supports the creation and removal of users then you will also need to provide implementation of the createUniqueId() and removeEntity() methods. Much as its name implies createUniqueId() is responsible for adding a user in the data source based on a unique value for that user, removeEntity() is responsible for not only removing the user but also all the user properties that have been added during his lifetime.

That's all there is to it. You're now ready to package your custom EntityPropertyManager EJB, deploy it, and register it with the UserProfileManager.

Deploy and Register
The User Manager framework is defined in the UserManager EJB located in usermgmt.jar. It is here that we can redefine not only the user and group managers but also the profile managers and their associated EntityPropertyManagers. After our EJB has been packaged we will need to make a slight modification to the deployment descriptor of the UserManager to map a property set to our new EntityPropertyManager. In the ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptor of the UserManager EJB we will add an environment entry setting to map our custom property set and an EJB reference to point to the EntityPropertyManager that handles our property set (see Listings 1 and 2).

Once the entries have been added to the ejb-jar.xml file the final step is to map them to physical EJB locations in the JNDI tree. The only thing we'll do here is find the existing entry for the UserProfileManager under <weblogic-enterprise-bean> and add a new reference description (see Listing 3).

Note that here ${APPNAME} is a substitution variable that points to the node portalApp under the InitialContext of our JNDI Tree. WebLogic Server will automatically perform the variable substitution. Once you have made the appropriate changes to the deployment descriptors you're ready to go. One last word on configuration: if your custom EntityPropertyManager supports adding and removing users then you will also need to add creator and remover environment entries as well (see Listing 4).

These are arbitrary since they will be mapped appropriately when a profile is added or removed.

Finishing Touches
The only thing remaining to do is to create a user profile in the EBCC that maps to the User Profile that you just created and registered with the UserManager EJB (see Figure 4).