Reorder categories in OIM 11g?

Question

Hi, everyone,
I know you can reorder attributes inside of each entity category to control their order of appearance in the OIM UI. However, I'm wondering if anyone knows how to reorder the categories themselves - there's no obvious way to do this in the OIM Advanced Administration UI that I can find.
I'm considering creating some custom user entity attribute categories, but my decision will be affected by whether or not I can control where the new categories appear in the UI. If I can't reorder the categories, then my UI will display all the out-of-the-box categories of information before my custom categories, which will not be very user-friendly (don't want users to have to scroll through a bunch of password and LDAP stuff before seeing my new attributes).
I looked into creating custom request templates to control what attributes are included in self-registration, user creation, profile management, etc., but there's no place there either to change the order of the attribute categories.
Any ideas? Or am I stuck with the out-of-the-box user attribute category order?
Thanks,
- Ariel

Answer 1

Hi Ariel,
One thing you could try is to modify the User.xml file. It has a lot of stuff relating to the User Configuration stuff. It appears to have entries that define the order of the categories e.g.
<metadata>
<name>2</name>
<value>Account Settings</value>
<category>categories.order</category>
</metadata>
<metadata>
<name>1</name>
<value>Basic User Information</value>
<category>categories.order</category>
</metadata>
You can export the User.xml file from MDS using the weblogic enterprise manager exportMetadata operation. Export the file, edit it and then importMetadata using weblogic. To get OIM to pick up the changes we found it best to restart OIM and SOA, or just restart the whole weblogic thing in its entirety.
As an alternative you could try using OIM Deployment Manager to export User Metadata, then edit the exported XML file (look for 'categories.order'), and reimport the file using the Deployment Manager.
If you edit the order I'd suggest making sure that there are no gaps in the number sequence and no duplicates.
Things to note:
1) I have no idea if this works or is supported
2) Do it at your own risk.
Good luck