Introduction

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Chapter 7 Using Category Systems : Introduction

Introduction

The category system enables you to search UDDI entities by category. In TIBCO ActiveMatrix Runtime UDDI Server, a category is described as a tModel. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Runtime UDDI Server comes with a set of pre-loaded canonical tModels.

There are two types of categories in TIBCO ActiveMatrix Runtime UDDI Server: the checked category and the unchecked category.

Checked Category

When you attempt to publish an entity that is to be categorized as checked, the values are validated by a registered web service before the entity is created. If the values are invalid, the entity will be rejected by the UDDI registry.

Values can be validated in one of the following two ways.

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Values are cached by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Runtime UDDI Server

In this case, valid values are cached in the memory. The category publisher must provide a web service with the get_allValidValues API and the tModel of the category must be categorized as cacheable. For information about the get_allValidValues API, see Section 5.6.3 get_allValidValues in UDDI Version 3.0.2 at http://www.uddi.org/pubs/uddi_v3.htm#_Toc85908144.

This type of validation is usually for categories that can be cached by the UDDI node. This is because their value sets are pre-defined and fixed.

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Values are not cached

If a category requires contextual checking, each reference to the category will be validated by an external web service. The category publisher must provide a web service with the validate_values API and the tModel of the category must not be categorized as cacheable. For information about the validate_values API, see Section 5.6.2 validate_values in UDDI Version 3.0.2 at http://uddi.org/pubs/uddi-v3.0.2-20041019.htm#_Toc85908143.

This type of validation is usually for the references to the value sets required for contextual checking.

In both the cached and not cached cases, the tModel should be categorized with the validatedby category so that TIBCO ActiveMatrix Runtime UDDI Server can validate the values by calling corresponding web services.

For more information about checked categories and the related examples, see Using Checked Categories. The required files for running category system examples are in UDDI_HOME/sample/data/taxonomy.

Unchecked Category

For a category of this type, the reference is not checked. You can use any value (typically in the keyValue attribute of the keyedReference element) for the category.

An unchecked category can have an unlimited amount of values.

For more information about unchecked categories and the related examples, see Using Unchecked Categories. The required files for running category examples are in UDDI_HOME/sample/data/taxonomy.