Configuring Providers

Providers configuration table can be accessed via Edit Driver/Plugin Options action of the Distributed Architecture plugin's global configuration context. Every provider has the following properties:

  • Enabled. Enables or disables provider.

  • Name. The unique name of provider. Name must follow context naming conventions.

  • Connection Type. For Incoming connection, this consumer awaits and accepts TCP connections from providers. For Outgoing connections, the consumer establishes its own TCP connection to provider.

  • Server Address. Address of primary (or the only) provider server. Valid for Outgoing provider connections.

  • Failover Server Address. Address of failover server to be used if the primary server is unreachable. Connections to the failover server will be maintained until the failover server is unreachable. If both primary and failover servers are unreachable, server will periodically attempt to establish a connection to both. Optional and valid for Outgoing provider connections.

  • Port. Port number on provider server to connect to. Valid for Outgoing provider connections.

  • Username. Name of user account to use for authorization on provider server.

  • Password. Password for the above user account.

  • Mount Points. The list of remote context sub-trees or individual contexts that will be attached to the local context tree. Properties of a mount point are described below.

Mount Point Configuration

  • Name. When the root context of the remote context sub-tree will be attached to the local tree, its local name will differ from the remote name. This local name is defined by the mount point's Name setting.

  • Local Path (Mount Point). Path of context that will act as a "connection point" for contexts imported from the provider server. This is the path on local (consumer) server.

  • Remote Path (Root Node of Imported Context Subtree). Path of root context of context sub-tree what will be imported from provider server. This is the path on remote (provider) server.

It's important to understand the difference between "real" and "mapped" container contexts before specifying a Remote Path. See Visible and Real Context Trees for more details.

Example 1

Imagine that provider server has the following contexts:

A

A.B

A.B.C1

A.B.C2

The consumer server wants to import context sub-tree rooted at A.B. The imported sub-tree should be connected at path X.Y of the provider context.

For the above setup, we can use the following Mount Point configuration options:

  • Name: P

  • Local Path: X.Y

  • Remote Path: A.B

Once the consumer-provider connection is established and import operation succeed, we'll get the following relations between paths of contexts:

Context Path on Provider Server

Matching Context Path on Consumer Server

A.B

X.Y.P

A.B.C1

X.Y.P.C1

A.B.C2

X.Y.P.C2

It may seem more logical that paths on consumer server should start from X.Y.B. However, the name of root imported context is substituted by provider name (i.e. B substituted by P). This is necessary to avoid name duplication.

For example, the consumer server has "admin" context in "users", and we want to import "admin" context from provider server by using "users" as a mount point. We can name the provider "provider_admin" and, thus, the path of root imported context on consumer server will be "users.provider_admin".

The root context name substitution also helps to import remote root context (whose context path equals to empty string).

Example 2

This example explains how to connect a user of a remote server to a local server's Users container to make remote user acting as a local one. In this case the consumer server (one that will host the remote user) will connect to the provider server itself in a classic way (like a client connects to a server).

To configure the described use case, add the following record to the Providers table on the consumer server:

Name

Any connection name, e.g. remoteUserProvider.

Connection Type

Outgoing

Address

Address of the provider server

Port

6420

Username

Username to use for authorization on the provider server.

Password

Password to use for authorization on the provider server.

Mount Points

One mount point with the following parameters:

  • Name: Name that will be given to the remote user context in the local context tree, e.g. importedUser.

  • Local Context Path (Mount Point): Local users context, i.e. users.

  • Remote Context Path (Root Node of Imported Context Subtree): Full path of the remote user context, e.g. users.exportedUser.

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