Best documentation is on uPortal wiki: PersonDirectory
uPortal comes with legacy personDirs.xml enabled. To see how the Spring configured version works, we'll switch to that and add a silly attribute.
Step 1.
In the OtherProperties directory of the uportal 101 Eclipse project find
IsDemo.personDirectory.xml
It has commented out the section pointing to the legacy implementation and uncommented the beans:
org.jasig.portal.services.persondir.support.CachingPersonAttributeDaoImpl org.jasig.portal.services.persondir.support.MergingPersonAttributeDaoImpl
and defined two source beans:
uPortalJdbcAttributeSource
which is the functional equivalent of the legacy implementation and a new source:
PortalDbJndiTestDemoSource
The new source uses the jndi source PersonDb instead of the default portal database. In our setup PersonDb also points to the default database but in production it wouls be pointed to an authoritative source for attributes.
The new source creates an attribute with a value of either "yup" or "nope" depending on whether the user is demo. So