CentraSite 10.7 | CentraSite User’s Guide | Asset Management | Managing Assets through CentraSite Control | Application Management | Adding an Application to Your Asset Catalog
 
Adding an Application to Your Asset Catalog
Pre-requisites:
To add assets to an organization's asset catalog, you must belong to a role that has the Create Assets or Manage Assets permission for that organization.
Note:
By default, users with the CentraSite Administrator or Asset Administrator role have this permission.
You create an Application asset to specify the consumer applications that are authorized to consume a particular Service, BPEL Process, or XML Schema.
The Application asset type is one of the predefined asset types installed with CentraSite. Application assets are used by the policy-enforcement point (PEP) to determine from which consumer application a request for an asset originated. An Application asset defines the precise characteristics by which the PEP can identify or authenticate messages from a specific consumer application at run-time.
In CentraSite Control, you add an Application asset to the catalog from scratch, meaning that you create the Application asset (and set its attributes) manually.
When defining Application assets, keep the following points in mind:
*Any user who has permission to publish an asset to CentraSite can define an Application asset. However, not all users are generally qualified to create an asset of this type. Defining applications is a critical task that should be performed only by an administrator who is familiar with the Mediator(s), virtual services, and run-time policies in your environment.
*An Application asset becomes available to Mediator only when you synchronize the consumer application in CentraSite with the Mediator.
*Treat Application assets as global objects and make them available to all organizations. Be sure that your registry contains only one Application asset per consumer application (that is, a consumer application should be represented by one and only one Application asset in the registry).
*Be sure that the identifiers that you assign to an Application asset are unique to that Application asset. If multiple Application assets have the same identifier, Mediator associates the identifier with the first matching application it finds in its local list of Application assets at run time.
*If you control access to virtual services based on consumer applications (that is, you use run-time policies that include the Authorize User action), consider:
*Including an approval step in your consumer-registration policy that requires a security administrator to review and approve the registration event.
*Giving only a small group of knowledgeable administrators permission to modify an Application asset after it is registered to a virtual service. This prevents users from adding unauthorized identifiers to an existing Application asset and thus, allowing unauthorized consumer applications to access the virtual service.
*To add an Application asset to the catalog
1. In CentraSite Control, go to Asset Catalog > Browse.
2. Click Add Asset.
3. In the Add Asset dialog box, provide the required information for each of the displayed data fields.
Field
Description
Type
Select the asset type, Application.
Name
Optional. Name of the Application asset.
Note:
This is the name that users will see when they view this Application in the CentraSite User Interfaces. Therefore, we recommend that you specify a meaningful name for each Application.
An Application asset name can contain any characters (including spaces), and must be unique within an organization.
Description
Optional. The description for the Application.
Note:
This is the description information that users will see when they view this Application in the CentraSite User Interfaces. Therefore, we recommend that you specify a meaningful description for each Application.
Organization
The organization to which you want to add the Application. (The Organization list only displays organizations for which you have the Manage Assets permission or at least the Create Assets permission.) If you select an organization other than your own organization, you will nevertheless be the owner of the asset.
Important:
Select the organization carefully. You cannot change the organization assignment later. You can, however, export a Application asset from one organization and import it to another.
Initial Version
Optional. An identifier for the initial version of the Application. This is the user-defined version, as opposed to the automatically assigned system version. You can enter any string in this field, that is, the version identifier does not need to be numeric. You can also leave the field blank. You can later create new versions of the asset. The default is 1.0.
If the versioning feature is disabled for the Service asset type, the field is nevertheless displayed, thus allowing you to assign an identifier for this first version.0
4. Click OK.
The newly created Application asset is added to the CentraSite Registry Repository.
5. Configure the extended attributes of the Application asset.