Oracle® Fusion Middleware
Part 6. General Configuration

For convenience, the Policy Studio displays various global configuration options. For example, it includes libraries of users, X.509 certificates, and schemas that can be added globally and then referenced in filters and policies. This avoids the need to reconfigure details over and over again (for example, each time a schema or certificate is used).

The following global configuration options are available in the Policy Studio, each of which are discussed briefly in the sections below:

You can manage the server configuration for the API Gateway using the Server menu option in the Policy Studio main menu. This includes deploying the server configuration.

For more details, see the Server Configuration topic.

You can configure the underlying configuration settings for the API Gateway using the Settings node in the Policy Studio tree. This includes the following tabs:

For more details, see the API Gateway Settings topic.

The easiest way to secure a Web Service with the API Gateway is to import the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file for the service using the Policy Studio. This creates a Service Handler for the Web Service, which is used to control and validate requests to the Web Service and responses from the Web Service.

The WSDL file is also added to the Web Services Repository, making sure to update the URL of the Web Service to point at the machine on which the API Gateway is running instead of that on which the Web Service is running. Consumers of the Web Service can then query the API Gateway for the WSDL file for the Web Service. The consumer then knows to route messages to the API Gateway instead of attempting to route directly to the Web Service, which most likely will not be available on a public IP address.

The Web Services Repository offers administrators a very simple way of securing a Web Service with minimal impact on consumers of that service. Because of this, the Web Services Repository should be used as the primary method of setting up policies within the Policy Studio. For more information on using the Repository to setup policies, see the Managing the Web Service Repository topic.

A single running instance of the API Gateway enables you to configure at least two interfaces: one for public traffic, and a second for listening for and serving configuration data. The configuration interface should rarely need to be updated. However, it is likely that you will want to add several HTTP interfaces. For example, you may want to add an HTTP interface and an SSL-enabled HTTPS interface.

For more information on configuring API Gateway instances, see the Configuring API Gateway Instances topic.

A policy is made up of a sequence of modular, reusable message filters, each of which processes the message in a particular way. There are many categories of filters available, including authentication, authorization, content filtering, routing, and many more. For example, a typical policy might contain an authentication filter, followed by several content-based filters (for example, Schema Validation, Threatening Content, Message Size, XML Complexity, and so on), and provided all configured filters run successfully, the message is routed on to the configured destination.

A policy can be thought of as a network of message filters. A message can traverse different paths through the network depending on what filters succeed or fail. This enables you to configure policies that, for example, route messages that pass one Schema Validation filter to one back-end system, and route messages that pass a different Schema Validation filter to a different system.

You can use Policy Containers to help manage your policies. These are typically used to group together a number of similar policies (for example, all authentication policies) or to act as an umbrella around several policies that relate to a particular policy (for example, all policies for the getQuote Web Service). A number of useful policies that ship with the API Gateway are found in the Policy Library Policy Container. This container is pre-populated with policies to return various types of faults to the client and policies to block certain types of threatening content, among others. You can also add your own policies to this container, and create your own Policy Containers as necessary to suit your own requirements.

The API Gateway must be able to trust X.509 certificates to establish SSL connections with external servers, validate XML Signatures, encrypt XML segments for certain recipients, and for other such cryptographic operations. Similarly, a private key is required to carry out certain other cryptographic operations, such as message signing and decrypting data.

The Certificate Store contains all the certificates and keys that are considered to be trusted by the API Gateway. Certificates can be imported into or created by the Certificate Store. You can also assign a private key to the public key stored in a certificate, by importing the private key, or by generating one using the provided interface.

For more information on importing and creating certificates and keys, see the Certificates and Keys topic.

Users are mainly used for authentication purposes in the API Gateway. In this context, the User Store acts as a repository for user information against which users can be authenticated. You can also store user attributes for each user or user group. For example, you can then use these attributes when generating SAML attribute assertions on behalf of the user.

The API Gateway Users topic contains more details on how to create users, user groups, and attributes.

For more details on how to configure the API Gateway to send these alerts, see the System Alerting topic.

The API Gateway can leverage your existing identity management infrastructure and avoid maintaining separate silos of user information. For example, if you already have a database full of user credentials, the API Gateway can authenticate requests against this database, rather than using its own internal user store. Similarly, the API Gateway can authorize users, lookup user attributes, and validate certificates against third-party identity management servers.

You can add each connection to an external system as a global External Connection in the Policy Studio so that it can be reused across all filters and policies. For example, if you create a policy that authenticates users against an LDAP directory and then validates an XML signature by retrieving a public key from the same LDAP directory, it makes sense to create a global External Connection for that LDAP directory. You can then select the LDAP Connection in both the authentication and XML signature verification filters, rather than having to reconfigure it in both filters.

For example, you can use the External Connections interface to configure global connections such as the following:

You can also use External Connections in cases where you want to configure a group of related URLs. This is most useful in cases where you want to round-robin between a number of related URLs to ensure high availability. When the API Gateway is configured to use a URL Connection Set (instead of just a single URL), it round-robins between the URLs in the set.

For more information on configuring External Connections and Connection Sets, see the External Connections topic.

You can configure the API Gateway to cache responses from a back-end Web Service. For example, if the API Gateway receives two successive identical requests it can (if configured) take the response for this request from the cache instead of routing the request on to the Web Service and asking it to generate the response again.

As a result, excess traffic is diverted from the Web Service making it more responsive to requests for other services. The API Gateway is saved the processing effort of routing identical requests unnecessarily to the Web Service, and the client benefits from the far shorter response time.

You can configure local caches for each running instance of the API Gateway. If you have deployed multiple API Gateways throughout your network, you can configure a distributed cache where cache events on one cache are replicated across all others. For example, if a response message is cached at one instance of the API Gateway, it is added to all other caches.

For more details on how to configure the API Gateway to use local and distributed caches, see the Global Caches topic.

The White list is a global library of regular expressions that can be used across several different filters. For example, the Validate HTTP Headers, Validate Query String, and Validate Message Attributes filters all use regular expressions from the White list to ensure that various parts of the request contain expected content.

The White list is pre-populated with regular expressions that can be used to identify common data formats, such as alphanumeric characters, dates, email addresses, IP addresses, and so on. For example, if a particular HTTP header is expected to contain an email address, the Email Address expression from the library can be run against the HTTP header to ensure that it contains an email address as expected. This is yet another way that the API Gateway can ensure that only the correct data reaches the Web Service.

While the White list contains regular expressions to identify valid data, the Black list contains regular expressions that are used to identify common attack signatures. For example, this includes expressions to scan for SQL injection attacks, buffer overflow attacks, ASCII control characters, DTD entity expansion attacks, and many more.

You can run various parts of the request message against the regular expressions contained in the Black list library. For example, the HTTP headers, request query string, and message (MIME) parts can be scanned for SQL injection attacks by selecting the SQL-type expressions from the Black list. The Threatening Content filter also uses regular expressions from the Black list to identify attack signatures in request messages.

For more details on running regular expressions, see the following topics:

The Schema Cache contains the XML Schemas that the API Gateway can use to validate incoming requests against. The Schema Validation filter validates the format of an incoming message against a schema from the cache. This ensures that only messages of the correct format are processed by the target system.

In the Policy Studio navigation tree, you can access the global Schema Library by selecting Resources -> Schemas. Select a child node to view or edit its contents. To add a schema or schema container, right-click the Scripts node, and select the appropriate option. For more details on importing XML Schemas into the cache, and using containers organize schemas, see the Global Schema Cache topic.

When you have imported your XML schemas, see the Schema Validation topic for instructions on how to validate XML messages against the schemas in the cache.

The Scripts Library contains the JavaScript and Groovy scripts that the API Gateway can use to interact with the message as it is processed. For example, you use these scripts with the Scripting Filter to get, set, and evaluate specific message attributes.

In the Policy Studio navigation tree, you can access the global Scripts Library by selecting Resources -> Scripts. Select a child node to view or edit its contents. To add a script, right-click the Scripts node, and select Add Script.

For more details on using the Scripts Library dialog to add scripts, and on configuring the API Gateway to use scripts, see the topic on the Scripting Language Filter.

The Stylesheet Library contains the XSLT stylesheets that the API Gateway can use to transform incoming request messages. The XSLT Transformation filter enables you convert the contents of a message using these stylesheets. For example, an incoming XML message that adheres to a specific XML schema can be converted to an XML message that adheres to a different schema before it is sent to the destination Web Service.

In the Policy Studio navigation tree, you can access the global Stylesheet Library by selecting Resources -> Stylesheets. Select a child node to view or edit its contents. To add a stylesheet, right-click the Stylesheets node, and select Add Stylesheet.

For more details on using the Stylesheet Library dialog to add stylesheets, and on configuring the API Gateway to use XSLT stylesheets, see the topic on the XSLT Transformation filter.

References can occur between API Gateway configurations items (for example, a policy might include a reference to an external connection to a database). You can view references between configuration items in the Policy Studio by right-clicking an item, and selecting Show All References. References are displayed in a tab at the bottom of the screen.

The Show All References option is enabled only for items that have references to other items. For an example in a default API Gateway installation, right-click External Connections -> LDAP Connections -> Sample Active Directory Connection, and select Show all References. Showing all references is useful for impact analysis (for example, before upgrading or migrating), and is a general navigation aid.