PingFederate allows you to use a configuration of an adapter (as well as certain other PingFederate plugins) as a parent instance from which you can create child instances. You can then modify the inherited configuration for the child instances as needed. This feature provides easier management of adapter settings in cases where only small changes to an existing adapter (or plugin) configuration need to be made for a particular use case.

For example, different SP-connection adapter instances might have their own IdP logon URLs (for branding or other application ownership reasons) while the majority of the other adapter configuration settings are the same. In this case, you might want to use a parent/child configuration to override the logon URLs.

Tip:

You can also override adapter instances as part of mapping them into either SP or IdP connections, for cases where overridden settings may apply only to one particular connection configuration.

Any changes to a parent configuration are propagated to its child (or connection-based) configurations provided the changes are not already overridden in the derived instance.

In addition to adapters, PingFederate allows you to create parent/child configurations for the following plugin types: