Policies

As explained in the Endpoint Policy chapter in this guide, Sentinet policies are expressed via standard or custom WCF bindings that can either be shared between multiple services and endpoints or attached as private copies to individual endpoints.

Important

This User Guide in general and this chapter specifically, describe Policies in terms of WCF XML binding configurations, which is an all-inclusive approach to address hundreds of Policies’ permutations. Most often Sentinet users can deal with Policies in very simple terms that can be described by the Design and its User Interface drop-down choices.

Just like any other API software asset, Sentinet stores shared policies in Repository folders. Each folder may have its own collection of shared policies that an organization, a project or a solution folder is standardizing on. Expand Policies item in the folder structure, and select specific shared Policy tree item to view or modify its configuration.

Figure. Policies group element and example of the shared policy, SOAP-HTTP configuration.

To add a new shared policy to a Repository folder, select that folder and select the Add->Policy menu option from the main toolbar, or right-click selected Folder and select the Add->Policy pop-up menu option. Provide a policy-friendly name, description and a policy configuration in WCF XML format. Sentinet policy can be defined as a standard WCF binding configuration (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163394.aspx for WCF binding overview), or as a custom binding configuration (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347793.aspx for a WCF custom bindings overview). WCF custom bindings can be configured as a customized WCF system-provided binding, or as a completely new binding that implements custom or third party encoding, transport or security protocols (see the example of IBM WebSphere MQ for a custom third party binding at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wmqv7/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.mq.csqzav.doc%2Fun12060_.htm).

Sentinet developers and administrators can define their own new WCF bindings or use third party WCF bindings as shared or private Sentinet policies. Assemblies that contain non-system-provided WCF binding channels implementations must be available at runtime to the Sentinet Nodes that use them. These assemblies can either be copied to the Sentinet Node bin folder or registered in .NET 4.0 Global Assembly Cache. Follow the same recommendations for deploying custom bindings as described in this guide for custom Outbound Endpoints Behavior.