[Ejbca-develop] Question about external data sources

[Henrik <Hen...@Go...>]

Hi,

I got the following (simplified) setup:
A database with user information (username, salted password hash, as well
as further user attributes), which is supposed to be read-only from EJBCA
perspective.
(It's actually two databases that need some logic to combine the
attributes.)
I'd like to use EJBCA in a way that the RA queries that setup when a user
wants to request a certificate for an end entity via the EJBCA web
interface. So when a user is supposed to log in with username and password,
these credentials should be retrieved from the custom setup.
I guess that is what the "Framework for External User Data Sources" is for?
http://www.ejbca.org/adminguide.html#Framework%20for%20External%20User%20Data%20Sources

Is there a more detailed manual for this step available somewhere?

My naive expectation was, that I'd have to implement an interface with a
function like fetchUser(name, passwd), where this would either return nil
if the user wasn't found or if the password didn't match, or it would
return a user/EndEntity instance if user was found and password did match.

However, what I found was some function fetch(Admin admin, Sting
searchstring), that returns a collection of UserDataSourceVO for all users
that matched the searchstring.

It seems I'm misunderstanding the concept of a custom data source. Can
someone elaborate on it?

So in a nutshell, my questions are:

* How can I initialize users with username and password?
* What are custom data sources used for, if not for the above?

Kind regards,
Henrik