Supported HTTP Methods of Web Agents in Policy Agent 2.2–01

Prior to Policy Agent 2.2–01, the only HTTP methods supported by web agents were GET, HEAD, PUT, POST, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS. Any request received by the agent with a method other than one of these was marked as UNKNOWN and access to the resource was denied.

Policy Agent 2.2–01 Web Agents: Newly Supported HTTP Methods

With Policy Agent 2.2–01, web agents also support the following methods: CONNECT, COPY, INVALID, LOCK, UNLOCK, MOVE, MKCOL, PATCH, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH.

By default, policies in Access Manager only allow control of GET and POST actions. To extend Access Manager control to other actions, see the corresponding Access Manager document. For example, for Access Manager 7.1, see Adding a Policy Enabled Service in Sun Java System Access Manager 7.1 Administration Guide.

Policy Agent 2.2–01 Web Agents: Support for INVALID Methods

Typically, a web server marks a request as an INVALID method and denies access to the resource when the request uses a method other than any of the methods listed in the preceding section.

However, in cases where the web server is configured to forward requests to an application that can handle non-standard HTTP methods, the web server does not deny access, but forwards the request to the requested application. You can configure Access Manager to allow or deny such INVALID requests. A typical example is when a web agent is installed on Apache HTTP Server that is configured as a proxy for Microsoft Exchange Server. In this scenario, requests can use methods such as SEARCH or SUBSCRIBE, which are not recognized by Apache HTTP Server and, therefore, marked as INVALID.

To decide if such requests should be allowed or denied, the INVALID method must be loaded in the iPlanetAMWebAgentService service.