Adding Policy Assertions

ActiveVOS Designer User’s Guide

Adding Policy Assertions

The WS-Policy specification allows Web service providers and clients to express a broad range of capabilities, requirements, and preferences in a standard way through policy assertions. If desired, you can add one or more policy assertions to the partner link’s endpoint reference section of a process deployment descriptor file.

As a simpler alternative to adding individual policy assertions to partner links, you can add a policy reference. The policy reference is a pointer to policies defined in the process’s WSDL file. For details, see User-Defined Policy Assertion.

You can add a policy assertion to both the Partner Role partner link and the My Role partner link in the Deployment Descriptor wizard.

Many policy assertions specify both an inbound and outbound direction. An inbound assertion governs messages received by the BPEL process, such as messages for receives and replies from invoked services. An outbound assertion governs messages sent by the process, such as requests to an invoked service and replies matching receives.

Note: Policy assertions apply to static endpoint references for partner roles in the PDD wizard. To add a policy assertion to a principal, add the details to the partner definition file. For a dynamic endpoint reference, you can manually add the details to the appropriate copy operation in an assign activity.

The supported policy assertions are described in the following table:

Policy	Description
WS-Security Policy Assertions: Authentication	Credentials required for access to a service
Encryption	Describes the parts of a SOAP message to encrypt
Signature	Describes the parts of a SOAP message to sign with an XML Signature, using an X.509 Certificate token
Timestamp	Adds a `<Timestamp>` element to the SOAP header of a message
Other Policy Assertions: Retry	Describes when and how many times to retry an invoked service that does not reply
User-Defined Policy Assertion	Placeholder for a custom solution you provide for handling messages from a particular service provider. Place where you can add WS-Policy Reference.
Engine-Managed Correlation	A My Role policy assertion that directs the ActiveVOS server to use WS-Addressing to transmit replyTo endpoint references during transmissions to the Partner Role partner link
WS-Reliable Messaging	Specifies that a partner link participates in an industry-standard protocol that supports guaranteed delivery of messages
JMS Delivery Options	For details, see Using a Java Messaging Service Invoke Handler
HTTP Transport	Used for REST-based invocations
REST Enabled	Used for REST-based invocations
SAML	The Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) is an OASIS standard that enables loosely coupled and federated identity integration.
Message Validation	Provide fine-grained validation of WSDL messages for a partner link to enable faster processing
Web Service Timeout	Set an amount of time to wait for a specific Web service to time out
Invoke Recovery	Select whether to suspend a process with a pending invoke when the recovers from a failed server
Send WS-Addressing Headers	Explicitly add addressing to invokes
WSDL Binding Reference	Applicable for a my role partnerlink to refer to a WSDL binding instead of RPC or Document
Suppress xsi:type	A workaround for suppressing schema validation in SOAP messages, useful for dealing with legacy services that cannot handle xsi:type attributes

To add one or more policies to a partner link:

In the Deployment Descriptor wizard, navigate to the Partner Links page. See Creating a Process Deployment Descriptor File for details on opening the New Deployment Descriptor dialog.
For a partner role partner link, select static as the Endpoint Reference Type.
Select the Dialog button at the end of the Endpoint Reference text box.
Select the Policy Assertions tab, as shown in the example.

Policy Assertions List

Select the Add button to open the Policy Assertion dialog.
From the Policy Template list, select the policy you wish to add, and fill in all the required information. For details, select a name from the supported policies listed at the top of this topic.
Select OK.
Select Add again to add additional policies.
Add My Role policy assertions by doing the following:

Select a My Role partner link.
Select the My Role Policy tab.
Select applicable inbound/outbound policies, as described above, for the My Role service.

The following example shows one policy assertion scenario for the loan approval process described in the ActiveVOS Designer tutorial.

Partner link	Policy Assertion	Direction	Result
My Role: customer	signature of creditInformation message	inbound	Signed message is received from person requesting a loan
	signature of creditInformation message	outbound	Signed message is sent back to person requesting a loan
Partner Role: assessor	signature of creditInformation message	outbound	Signed request is sent by the process to the Assessor, and signed request is sent to Approver
	signature of riskAssessment message	inbound	Signed reply is received by the process
Partner Role: approver	signature of creditInformation message	outbound	Signed request is sent by the process or by the Assessor to the Approver
	signature of approvalMessage	inbound	Signed reply is received by the process