Improved Support for SCIM User Language Fields

The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) is a standard for automating the exchange of user identity information between identity domains, or IT systems. The specification for this standard provides two fields related to each SCIM user’s language and localization settings.

• locale — Indicates the user’s default language
• preferredLanguage — Indicates the user’s preferred language

A 4me person record has the locale field to define a person’s language preference.

The default SCIM User Automation Rule now has improved logic to select the language preference when creating new 4me person records from a SCIM user import. To achieve this, two new expressions have been added:

The first checks whether a preferredLanguage value is specified for the SCIM user. If not, the locale value of the SCIM user is picked up:

locale: preferredLanguage then preferredLanguage else locale

The second new expression simply attempts to extract the language and region part:

locale: locale.replace(/^\s*(\w\w)(-\w\w)?.*/,’\1\2′)

Basically it strips any leading spaces, takes the first two word characters and the regional part, if found.

This works because 4me’s REST and SCIM APIs now start by searching for an exact match of the provided string when setting the locale of a person record. If a match is not found, they search for an exact match using only the language part (i.e. the letters before the dash). If that also fails, they search for a locale that starts with the language part. Here are some examples of matches that 4me’s APIs might find:

• pl → pl — exact match without regional part
• pt-PT → pt-PT — exact match with regional part
• nl-NL → nl — exact match on language part
• pt-MO → pt-PT — start of language part matches