How Concepts in the Provider API Map to the Access Manager Software

The Provider API furnishes architectural separation from the Access Manager; but the PAPI is implemented in terms of specific Access Manager APIs within the Portal Server framework.

Typically, to create a provider, you will need to access various software services for provider development. For example, this might include attribute (property) access, session services, and client-based property retrieval. In the PAPI, these services are accessible through the ProviderContext and ContainerProviderContext interfaces. The implementation of these interfaces connects to Access Manager services in an implementation independent manner. The actual implementation of software services, for the most part, is located in another layer; the context interfaces simply pull these features together into a common interface to simplify provider development.