The Concept of Consumers
In CentraSite there are three concepts of “consumers”.
The first refers to developers who discover assets in the catalog that they want to reuse. Such developers can register to become
registered consumers of those assets. You might give registered consumers access to more of the asset's metadata (that is, enable them to view additional profiles) and/or develop processes that notify them when changes occur to an asset that they consume.
The second concept refers specifically to any arbitrary asset that consumes any other asset in the
CentraSite registry. This specific type of consumer is for the design-time usage. For more information about consumers at design-time, refer to the chapter "Consumer Registrations" in
Run-Time Governance with CentraSite.
The third concept refers specifically to a computer application that consumes (invokes) virtual services at run time. This specific type of consumer is represented in the registry by instances of the
Application asset type. Application assets are used by
webMethods Mediator to determine from which computer application a request for a virtual service originated.
This discusses the type of consumer that represents a computer application that consumes virtual services. For clarity, the following sections in this document refer to this type of consumer as a consumer application.
