Realm Parsing

We have earlier shown how realms are used with TokenProviders to provide tokens, and also how they work with TokenValidators to validate a given token. However, we did not cover how realms are defined in the first place. Recall that the STSPropertiesMBean configuration object defined on AbstractOperation has a RealmParser property. The RealmParser is an interface which defines a pluggable way of defining a realm for the current request. It has a single method:

• String parseRealm(WebServiceContext context) - Return the realm of the current request given a WebServiceContext object.

Therefore if you wish to issue tokens in multiple realms, it is necessary to create an implementation of the RequestParser which will return a realm String given a context object. For example, different realms could be returned based on the endpoint URL or a HTTP parameter. This realm will then get used to select a TokenProvider implementation to use to issue a token of the desired type. It will also be used for token validation in a similar way.