Consumer Registration
Note: | Beginning with version 9.9, CentraSite does not support the Consumer Registration functionality in CentraSite Control. As a result:  The Register as Consumer action in the details page of an Application asset is removed from CentraSite Control. You cannot modify details of the consumers using the Consumers profile of an Application asset in the CentraSite Control. You can only view details of the consumers such as: Name, Description, Type of Consumer, Owner, Organization, Created date, Modified date, and the Lifecycle State. The Consumer Registrations section that provides functionality for viewing a summary of all consumer registration requests in conjunction with Pending Registrations and Registration Requests is removed from the Home > My CentraSite > Inbox page of CentraSite Control. The My Pending Consumer Registration Requests data feed that was used to construct a custom portlet for rendering the list of all consumer registration requests in CentraSite Business UI has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Therefore, you cannot register users, groups, or application assets as consumers of an asset using the CentraSite Control. Instead, you can use the enhanced interface, CentraSite Business UI that supports consumer registration for users, groups, and arbitrary assets (in contrast, earlier versions of CentraSite Business UI supported a standardized interface for consumer registration of Application assets only). Documentation of the prior consumer registration interface is available to CentraSite customers who have a current maintenance contract in Empower Product Support Website. |
The term consumer registration means providing users the ability to consume assets. Consumer registration with CentraSite enables asset providers to establish an enhanced level of protection and access control as to who can consume the assets using configurable approval workflows and thus allows the asset providers to visualize and control the consumption of their assets.
CentraSite's flexible and extensible asset catalog enables the asset providers to expose their reusable assets. At any time, asset consumers can discover the reusable assets in the asset catalog which functions as the central registry, and reuse them in their own applications. Consumer registration functionality provides the mechanism to establish the consumer-provider relationships in CentraSite at both design-time and run-time.
When you execute the consumer registration feature in CentraSite Business UI, CentraSite registers the asset as a consumer of the asset. However, if you have imposed an approval process, it triggers a review and approval process that includes the following steps:
1. CentraSite submits the request to the designated approvers for review and approval.
2. If the request is approved, CentraSite executes the consumer-registration policy. This policy registers the application asset with the virtual service.
Scope of Consumer Registration at Design-Time
At design-time, this functionality allows you to:
Register any arbitrary asset as consumer of other assets in your organization.
Fetch details about all of the consumers of a specific asset, also details about all of the assets that a specific asset is consuming.
Visualize the consumption relationship that exists between asset providers and asset consumers. This helps you to identify the artifacts in the registry that is affected if an asset is not available or must be changed. You can visualize the dependencies between assets using the
Asset Navigator page.
Scope of Consumer Registration at Run-Time
At run-time, this functionality lets you:
Enforce a level of run-time security checks by allowing a consumer to specify details about the consuming applications that in turn is used for identification of that application during invocation of the asset at run-time.
Determine whether a particular asset consumer is authorized to invoke the target asset.
Access the asset's metadata (that is, view additional profiles) and receive notifications when modifications are made to the asset that they consume.
Permissions Required to Register Consumers
Any user with a View instance-level permission on the asset to be consumed can register consumers for that asset. In addition to registering consumers for a particular asset, a user can also create new assets and register the newly created assets as consumer of that asset, provided that the user has Create Assets permission in CentraSite.
