Add portal application

Access Gateway applications can use policy and specialized policy configuration to create portal applications. In a portal some, or the bulk of traffic, is handled by a single back end, but other traffic is routed to specific back ends based on access policy and URI requests.

This guide details how to configure a header based application to route traffic to different back ends based on specific URI requests.

Architecture

In this architecture an end user requests a resource which is composed of the core URL, in this example www.myportal.com, and specific resources, everything to the right of the /. Access Gateway, using policy and additional configuration, then routes requests to one of several back ends. In this example any requests of the form www.myportal.com/2nd would be routed to 2ndbackend.myportal.com. Likewise, requests of type www.myportal.com/3rd to 3rdbackend.myportal.com and all others to backend.myportal.com. This guide will take you through the configuration of the header application and associated resources to configure such a portal application.

Before you begin

• Determine the external URL used by the application, in this example www.myportal.com
• Determine the universe of possible URIs, and their associated back ends.
  In this example:
  www.myportal.com/2nd > 2ndbackend.myportal.com.
  www.myportal.com/3rd > 3rdbackend.myportal.com.
  And all others to backend.myportal.com.
• Determine all required header attributes required for authentication.

Typical workflow

Task	Description
Create a containing group	Best practice, create an optional group to be assigned to the application.
Create header application	Create a header application which defaults to the shared common back end.
Assign certificate to a portal application	Assign an optional certificate to the application.
Add additional attributes	Add optional, but often necessary, additional attributes to the application.
Add required access policy	Add all required policy for all serviced URIs
Test the application	Test the application using header and policy simulation.