Contains metadata attributes that are part of the identity of an
application or a transaction.
ArmIdentityProperties
is new in ARM 4.0. It addresses a
requirement to accept a set of string (name,value) pairs that extend the
concept of application and transaction identity and context.
ARM defines two types of properties - identity and context. The difference
between them is as follows:
-
An identity property's name and value are the same for all
instances of an application or transaction.
-
A context property's name is the same for all instances of
an application or transaction, but a context property's value
may vary for each instance.
ArmIdentityProperties
contains some attributes that are
common to the identity of both an application and a transaction.
The full identity is captured in
ArmApplicationDefinition
and
ArmTransactionDefinition
, which each adds other attributes
to those listed here. All these attributes are immutable.
The common attributes include:
-
A set of identity names (maximum of 20; maximum length of 127 characters).
A set of identity values (maximum of 20; maximum length of 255 characters).
-
A set of context names (maximum of 20; maximum length of 127 characters).
The context values may change with each instance so they are not part of
the identity. The context values are in ArmApplication or ArmTransaction.
Property names and values are in arrays. A property name and value form
a (name,value) pair. The array index of a property value in the value
array is bound to the property name at the same index in the name array.
Moving the (name,value) pair to a different index does not affect the
identity of the application. For example, if an application is registered
once with a name A and a value X in array indices 0 and once with the
same name and value in array indices 1, the registered identity has not
changed.
If a name is repeated in the array, the name and its corresponding value
are ignored, and the first instance of the name in the array (and its
corresponding value) is used. If the pointer is null or points to a
zero-length string, the (name,value) pair is ignored. Names should not
contain trailing blank characters or consist of only blank characters.
The names of identity and context properties can be any string, with
one exception. Strings beginning with the four characters
"
ARM:
" are reserved for the ARM specification. The
specification will define names with known semantics using this prefix.
One name format is currently defined. Any name beginning with the
eight-character prefix "
ARM:CIM:
" represents a name defined
using the DMTF CIM (Distributed Management Task Force Common
Information Model) naming rules. For example,
"
ARM:CIM:CIM_SoftwareElement.Name
" indicates that the
property value has the semantics of the Name property of the
CIM_SoftwareElement
class. It is anticipated that additional
naming semantics are likely to be added in the future.
Objects implementing this interface are created using
ArmTransactionFactory.newArmIdentityProperties(java.lang.String[], java.lang.String[], java.lang.String[])
.