Discovery Service Architecture

The Access Manager Discovery Service includes Java and web services-based interfaces. Java applications use the client API (discussed in Client APIs in com.sun.identity.liberty.ws.disco) to form requests sent to the Discovery Service and to parse the responses received back from it. Requests are received by the Access Manager SOAP receiver, which constructs a SOAP message that incorporates the client request.

The Access Manager SOAP Binding Service defines how to send and receive messages using SOAP, an XML-based messaging protocol. The SOAP receiver is a servlet that constructs the message using these definitions. For more information, see Chapter 8, SOAP Binding Service.

The SOAP message is then sent to the Discovery Service, which parses a discovery resource identifier from it. This identifier is used to find a matching user DN. The necessary information is then culled from the corresponding profile, a response is generated, and the response is sent back to the SOAP receiver. The SOAP receiver then sends the response back to the client. The following figure illustrates this architecture.

Figure 7–1 Discovery Service Architecture