Custom authorization in Datapower

We have an enterprise authorization web service integrated to our Datapower Appliance as a custom AAA step.Everything seemed to work fine but it was showing “authorization failed” all the time.

The simple trick was to  just to put the <approved/> node in the stylesheet and the resulting node tree in case of success..

Simple, but have to know …

From Datapower Authentication and Authorization Redbook :

– Custom template
Authorization might be managed through an XSL stylesheet. Two different outputs are also possible for this XSL:

• The <approved/> element, which means “authorization success” to the DataPowerAAA framework

• The <declined/> element, which means “authorization failure”

Functional Quality Testing for SOA / WebServices

As the number of services is growing in our environment, the need for automatic regression/functional testing is increasing.  I have recenly encountered articles on IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality. It is nice tool, but having budget contraints we will have to build something on our own.

First thing that comes to mind to use Ant ant Junit tests that would be able to send SOAP and test results against expected XMLs. And quick search reveals IBM’s recent article on that topic:

 Testing SOA applications with WebSphere Integration Developer and Ant scripts

Also so far we have been using SOAPUI for our initial and integration unit testing, it would be nice to re-use existing SOAPUI projects in Continous Integration scripts and also expand them not only to send and receive results, but verify results against predefined set of results. Researching few articles on this theme: 

 Testing Web Services with SoapUI

Series of articles on continuous integration (CI), SoapUI and Groovy:
Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI – Part 1
Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI – Part 2
Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI – Part 3

SOAP integration, testing tools

Free SOAP tesing resources

My favourite Web Service testing tools – collection of links:

SOAPUI	java based desktop application for inspecting, invoking and functional and load testing of webservices over HTTP/HTTPS
Microsoft WFetch	Lightweight utility tool that helps to send any HTTP/HTTPS traffic including SOAP.It allows for very granular testing down to the authentication, authorization, custom headers, and much more. Especially useful for for SSL/certificate issues debugging
STORM	.NET desktop application used to dynamically invoke web services.
Web Service Studio Express	.NET based desktop application for invoking and testing of webservices over HTTP
WSDL Validator	Online WSDL validator
SOAP Sonar Personal	Powerful Web Services Functional Testing and Performance Loading for Developer and QA personnel developing applications based on WSDL and SOAP