Procedures

In Microsoft® Provisioning Framework (MPF), a procedure encapsulates the business logic necessary to automate provisioning tasks. When users make provisioning requests, procedures invoke the functionality required to complete the request.

A namespace consists of a group of related XML procedures. You can submit a request that contains a procedure that calls one or more procedures of a namespace, each of which invokes functionality from the underlying provider. For example, if you implement Active Directory with MPF, you can call XML procedures from the Active Directory Provider namespace to manipulate the functionality of the underlying Active Directory Provider. The Active Directory Provider is a Component Object Model (COM) object that provides the underlying functionality to execute the procedures.

You can create a namespace to group procedures together. For example, you can create a CreateUser namespace that contains procedures for creating a new credit card account for a user. This namespace might include the following procedures: CreateName, CreateAddress, and CreateCreditCardNumber.

For more information, see Namespaces, and Administering namespaces and procedures.