Overview of Dynamic Service Activator

Dynamic Service Activator enables business partners or their subscribers to dynamically activate services or run scripts on an SDX owner's SAE via the SAE's remote interface (see SDX Components Guide, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, Extending and Using the SAE's Remote Interface). For managing services, Dynamic Service Activator supports a fixed set of methods (see API for Dynamic Service Activator) and uses the SAE access interface module to access the SAE core API. For invoking scripts, Dynamic Service Activator uses the remote Java scripts interface module. These scripts can perform any function offered by the SAE's published Java APIs.

The SDX owner is responsible for:

• Deciding how to control clients' access to methods and scripts. You can allow all clients to access all methods and scripts in the directory or restrict clients' access to specific methods and scripts.
• Installing Dynamic Service Activator (see Installation Tasks).
• Configuring Dynamic Service Activator (see Configuration Tasks). If you will restrict clients' access to specific methods and scripts, this task involves configuring a set of access controls between a client and each method or script that the client can use.
• Creating any Java scripts that Dynamic Service Activator will invoke on an SAE (see SDX Components Guide, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, Extending and Using the SAE's Remote Interface).

The business partner is responsible for:

• Creating the gateway clients that communicate with the gateway (see API for Dynamic Service Activator).
• Optionally providing a way (for example, through the portal) for subscribers to activate services.

Dynamic Service Activator Operation

The following steps explain how Dynamic Service Activator interacts with other components to enable the gateway client to execute a method or script on a particular SAE. Figure 2 illustrates the processes.

1. The gateway client sends a SOAP message to the Web application server via HTTP.

The request includes:

• The name of the method or script that the gateway client wants to activate.
• The arguments that the gateway client wants to pass to the method or script.

2. The Web application server authenticates the gateway client's identity.
3. The Web application passes the SOAP request to Dynamic Service Activator.
4. Dynamic Service Activator checks that:

1. The Web application server authenticated the gateway client and refused any requests from an unauthenticated gateway client.
2. The gateway client is allowed to access the specified method or script.
3. The arguments supplied by the gateway client satisfy any restrictions specified in the Dynamic Service Activator configuration that apply to the gateway client for the requested method or script.

5. If the gateway client satisfies these requirements, Dynamic Service Activator passes an argument, such as a subscriber's IP address specified in the Dynamic Service Activator configuration, to the NIC (for information about the NIC, see SDX Components Guide, Vol. 2, Chapter 11, Overview of the NIC.)

Dynamic Service Activator requires a NIC that takes one of the following data keys and returns the corresponding SAE reference as the value:

• Subscriber's IP address
• Subscriber's DN
• Name with which the subscriber logs in

6. The NIC uses the argument to determine the SAE on which Dynamic Service Activator should execute the method or script.
7. Dynamic Service Activator passes the name of the method or script and the associated arguments to the SAE via CORBA.
8. The SAE executes the method or script and returns the expected output or SOAP fault codes via CORBA to Dynamic Service Activator.

The expected output from the method or script depends on the values the method or script is programmed to return. Some methods and scripts return no values; others may return a short indicator of the success or failure of the operation, an HTML page, or a complex data structure in a format the gateway client understands.

For information about the SOAP fault codes that the methods and scripts return, see SOAP Fault Codes for Dynamic Service Activator.

9. Dynamic Service Activator returns an output from the method or script to the gateway client via a SOAP response.

Figure 2: Dynamic Service Activator Operation