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Claim Management

A claim is a piece of information about a particular subject. It can be anything that the subject is owned by or associated with, such as name, group, preferences, etc. A claim provides a single and general notion to define the identity information related to the subject. Claim-based identity is a common way for any application to acquire identity information. It provides a consistent approach for all applications by hiding the lower level implementation. Claims are also used in identity propagation which is the replication of authenticated identities, by packaging the claims into one or more tokens (such as SAML). These tokens are then issued by an issuer (eg., security token service.

A user claim is a claim that is related to a user. It can be used to specify information that is directly related to the user, such as claims related to the street address, username, email, first name, and more.

An identity claim is a special claim related to identity management. It can be used to specify information about the user account or the state of a user account such as the lastLoginTime, accountDisabled, and accountLocked claims. Identity claims are identified by the claim URI. All identity claims have the term "identity" appended to the claim URI as follows: http://wso2.org/claims/identity/accountDisabled

The Claim Management component of WSO2 Carbon allows you to map a set of attributes from the underlying userstore to a set of defined claims. The underlying userstore can either be an internal or external JDBC userstore, Active Directory, or LDAP user store. You can configure the primary userstore using the deployment.toml file.  Each claim can be uniquely identified within the claim dialect by the Claim URI. Claim URIs are independent of the userstore and each claim URI can be mapped into any desired attribute in the userstore. Therefore, at the application level we would know about the claims, but not the attribute of the userstore. An advantage of this is that we do not need to be concerned about the userstore level when we develop an application as it is hidden by the claim management.

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In the case of every tenant startup, including the super tenant, the claim configurations are read directly from the the <IS_HOME>/repository/conf/claim-config.xml file. So claims mapped for SCIM in the super tenant's management console are not seen by a newly created tenant as the User Realm is always built using the configuration found in the claim-config.xml file. So the recommended approach is to do the claim mapping in the <IS_HOME>/repository/conf/claim-config.xml file. However, you must note that the claim-config.xml file is only read during the first startup of the server. Any modifications made to this file after the first startup would not have any effect.

For more information on SCIM, click here.

A set of claims is identified as a dialect. Different dialects represent the same piece of information with different claim URIs.

With the help of the Claim Management feature, different claims can be mapped with the attributes of the user that are associated with their profile.

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