Adding an Application Asset to the 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 can add a Application asset to the catalog in one of the following ways:
You can create an Application asset from scratch, meaning that you create the Application asset (and set its attributes) manually.
You can create an Application asset on-the-fly, meaning that you create the Application asset on-the-fly from the details page of the asset you want to consume using the
Consume Asset dialog.
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 the CentraSite Business UI activity bar, click Create Asset.
This opens the Create Asset wizard.
2. In the Basic Information profile, provide the required information for each of the displayed data fields.
In this field... | Specify... |
Name | Name of the Application asset. Note: This is the name that users will see when they view this Application asset in the CentraSite User Interfaces. Therefore, we recommend that you specify a meaningful name for Application Service. An Application asset name can contain any characters (including spaces), and must be unique within an organization. |
Type | The asset type, 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.) |
Initial Version | (Optional). The version identifier for the Application asset. 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 Application asset. The default is 1.0. Examples: 0.0a 1.0.0 (beta) Pre-release 001 V1-2007.04.30 |
Description | (Optional).. A comment or descriptive information about the new application asset. |
3. Click Next.
You cannot navigate to the next screen unless all the required attributes have been set.
4. In the Preview panel, review the basic information for the Application before you actually add to the CentraSite registry.
5. Click Save.
An Application asset instance is created in the specified organization and registered with the CentraSite registry/repository. The details page for the Application asset that you just created is displayed.
6. Configure the extended attributes of the Application asset as described later in this topic.