The requestor is a user on the publication registry who can ask for approval of data for promotion. Every user can ask for approval, but to be a requestor requires an administrator-assigned approval contact.

If a user does not have at least one assigned approval contact, an exception is thrown when this user asks for approval. There is no way for such a user to promote data to the discovery registry. By assigning approval contacts, the administrator determines whether to give users the opportunity to publish data to the discovery registry.

During the creation of users via the BEA AquaLogic Service Registry console or via API, the default approver, administrator, is assigned for all newly created users on the publication registry. The default approval contact for all users is administrator, though this does not apply to users defined in an external repository (LDAP). Note that demo data does not come with assigned approval contact. For example, the user demo_john does not have an assigned approver, thus the administrator must assign this user an approval contact in order for him to make a request.

For more information on the requestor's role, see the section Requestor's Actions.

The approver is a person or group who approves changes to the discovery registry. If the approval contact is group, then all its members are may approve data for promotion.

For detailed information on the approval contact's role, see the User's Guide, Approver's Actions .

A special approval contact exists in the approval process, the autoApprover. This role is defined in the registry at installation. The administrator can set autoApprover as the approval contact for trusted users.

This means that no human approval is required and such users' data is copied to the discovery registry upon request for approval, as long as context checking is successful.

The administrator is responsible for setting up BEA AquaLogic Service Registry and is therefore also responsible for setting up the approval process. The term administrator refers to the user of BEA AquaLogic Service Registry who can manage the registry. Note that all users who have permission to configure the approval process are allowed to set relationships between requestors and approval contacts.

The manager of the approval configuration assigns approval contact(s) for requestors.

For easy management of relationships between approvers and requestors, it is possible to create an approver or requestor either from an existing user or from a group. If an approver is a group then each user in this group can approve the promotion of data. When several users (requestors) are in the same group, then an approval contact can be assigned to the whole group.