Introduction to Identity Services Programming Guide

Identity Services is a new technology in OS X v10.5 that allows developers to access users and groups on a system in order to create customized access controls. Identity Services also introduces a new type of user, known as a sharing user. Sharing users are similar to standard users but do not have login access or a home directory. They are designed for users who only need access to network services such as file sharing or screen sharing.

Identity Services provides access to users and groups through two APIs. The Core Services Identity API supports user and group creation, enumeration, attribute inspection, credential management, and group membership management. The Collaboration framework is an Objective-C API providing access to identities, as well as managing a user interface element for selecting identities. All of these features can be combined for use in managing access control lists (ACLs).

This book describes the Identity Services architecture and explains how to leverage that architecture in new and existing Cocoa and Carbon applications. It is intended both for developers who want to use the Identity Services API and for system administrators who want to understand the infrastructure for users, groups, and access control lists.

Organization of This Document

This book contains the following chapters:

• Identity Services Overview describes the underlying structure of Identity Services.

• Using the Identity Picker explains how to select and create identities in a GUI-based application.

• Finding and Monitoring Identities explains how to search for identities using the CSIdentityQuery and CBIdentity classes.

• Working with Access Control Lists explains how to create, store, and load an ACL.