Target credentials

Credentials are grouped into administrator and system credentials. The primary credentials are the administrator and if there are a pair of credentials, the secondary credentials are the system. What is considered primary and secondary credentials is arbitrarily up to the connector developer. Historically, there has never been a connector with more than two credentials.

The Python credential variables are special in that they are encrypted until used. A best practice during development suggests retrieving credentials only when they are needed, reducing the window where credentials can be compromised. Additionally, there are security implications during development where passwords may be exposed through logging. After development is completed ensure that credentials are not logged or written out to disk.

Generally, development of a connector starts with the serverinfo operation and list user operation, in that order. The target system Test connection tab can be used to test connectivity by running the serverinfo operation. This is followed by testing the list operation with the "Test user list" operation, on the same Test connection page. These tests do not catch all the errors, but it is an easy sanity check when building your connector and can be safely run in production environments.

For other operations, it is recommended when developing and testing a connector that you are not using a production target system.

Multiple credentials (admin and system)

Both the admin and system creds handle multiple credentials by attempting a connect operation over both the admin and system creds until either an ACSuccess or ACNotConnected are returned. The logs indicate an connection attempt failure for each credential with the following logging:

Cannot connect to address [Address] by using [adminID] [sysID]

The return code ACNotConnected is a special case to indicate all connection attempts fail and this error code is used specifically to attempt the next failover in the proxy list. When implementing the connect function, do not return ACNotConnected for credential check failure.