The Centrify REST APIs expose all features of Identity Platform, including the ability to programmatically execute all functions of the Identity Service portals. This section discusses at a high level how you can use the REST APIs to:

• Integrate Identity Platform functionality with a web-based application.
  

• Automate Identity Platform functions.
  

• Customize features of Identity Platform. 
  

Integrating web-based functionality with Identity Platform

A simple integration scenario is calling the REST APIs to add Identity Platform features to your company's website or web applications. For example, you could call the APIs to bring a user's application icons (and access) into a company intranet, rather than requiring the user to go to a separate site (Centrify User portal) to access applications. You could design your own portal with its own branding, or combine application access with other features in a single front end.

When integrating Identity-Platform functionality with a web-based client application or site, you can write code that calls the API directly from a client (browser) or that calls the API from a web server, which in turn communicates with the browser. The approach you take depends on a number of factors, including the structure of your application and the languages in which you prefer to code, but in any case, the API supports either approach and this document provides examples of each.

Add Applications to a Website shows how to retrieve and place the application icons for a user in a web page by calling the REST API with back-end code for a web server.

Automating Identity Service functions

Many Identity Service tasks lend themselves to automation through the use of API functions. For example, you can automate one-time tasks, such as creating a set of users from an existing database (export user data to a .CSV file and execute a set of API functions to create the users in Identity Service) or on-going tasks, such as adding email support to reports, polling for status changes, modifying a set of users at one time, etc.

Depending on your platform, and the nature of the tasks, there are a couple of different approaches you can take:

• Call Linux shell scripts or Powershell scripts to execute API functions.
  

• Create a custom binary, such as a Windows service, or a Unix or Mac binary file, to execute API functions. 
  

Customizing Identity Service

You can call the API to customize your instances of cloud manager, user portal, or privilege service. For example, you could customize the login screen, or add functionality to any of the UI screens.

See Also

• Create and Manage Cloud Directory Users
• Manage Roles
• Manage Access to Applications