Oracle® Fusion Middleware
Part 29. Extensibility

A selector is a special syntax that enables API Gateway configuration settings to be evaluated and expanded at runtime based on metadata values (for example, from message attributes, a Key Property Store (KPS), or environment variables). The selector syntax uses the Java Unified Expression Language (JUEL) to evaluate and expand the specified values. Selectors provide powerful a feature when integrating with other systems or when customizing and extending the API Gateway.

When you press the Shift key and open a filter, you can edit all filter settings using text values in the advanced filter view. This means that you can specify all filter fields using the API Gateway selector syntax. For more details on the advanced view, see Advanced Filter View.

The API Gateway selector syntax uses JUEL to evaluate and expand the following types of values at runtime:

Accessing Fields

A message attribute selector can refer to a field of that message (for example certificate), and you can use . characters to access subfields. For example, the following selector expands to the username field of the object stored in the profile attribute in the message:

${profile.username}

You can also access fields indirectly using square brackets ([ and ]). For example, the following selector is equivalent to the previous example:

${profile[field]}

You can specify literal strings as follows:

${profile[“a field name with spaces”]}

For example, the following selector gets a certificate from a Keyed Property Store by specifying its Distinguished Name:

${kps.certsByDName[“CN=Joe, O=Vordel”].certificate}

Special Selector Keys

The following top-level keys are resolved specially:

Resolving Selectors

Each ${...} selector string is resolved step-by-step, passing an initial context object (for example, Message). The top-level key is offered to the context object, and if it resolves the field (for example, the message contains the named attribute), the resolved object is indexed with the next level of key. At each step, the following rules apply:

This section lists some example selectors that use expressions to evaluate and expand their values at runtime.

Message Attribute

The following message attribute selector returns the HTTP User-Agent header:

${http.headers["User-Agent"]}

For example, this might expand to the following value:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 
Safari/535.7

Environment Variable

In a default configuration, the following environment variable selector returns port 8091:

${env.PORT.MANAGEMENT + 1}

Key Property Store

The following KPS selector returns the certificate for the entry in the Certificate Store with the Joe Soap alias:

${kps.certsByAlias[“Joe Soap”].certificate}

This returns the Distinguished Name in that certificate:

${kps.certsByAlias[“Joe Soap”].certificate.getSubjectDN()}

This returns the certificate identified by the alias stored in the authentication.subject.id attribute:

${kps.certsByAlias[authentication.subject.id]}

Examples Using Reflection

The following message attribute selector returns the CGI argument from an HTTP URL (for example, returns bar for http://localhost/request.cgi?foo=bar):

${http.client.getCgiArgument("foo")}

This returns the name of the top-level element in an XML document:

${content.body.getDocument().getDocumentElement().getNodeName()}

This returns true if the HTTP response code lies between 200 and 299:

${http.response.status / 200 == 2}

There are a number of API Gateway filters that extract message attribute values (for example, Extract Certificate Attributes and Retrieve from HTTP Header). Using selectors to extract message attributes offers a more flexible alternative to using such filters. For more details on using selectors instead of these filters, contact Oracle Support (see Oracle Contact Details).