What
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Is a Pipeline
A pipeline is an ordered collection of tasks executed in sequence. This can be used to chain together tasks that are executed in order, e.g. call a service, transform its output from XML to JSON and return the response.
For more information on configuring pipelines for the Gateway see these pages Config - Pipelines.
What
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Is a Task
A task is an action performed within a pipeline - many different tasks exist, ranging from branches (if...then...else) task, to validations, conversions, logging, tracing to service callouts, proxying requests or returning responses.
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Here is a screenshot of how these tasks are edited in the Ceptor Console. You can reorder tasks by dragging them around in the list, and right-click them to add/remove more. You can also drag new tasks into the pipeline from the Task Palette.
Are
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Tasks Always Needed?
No, tasks are not always needed - you might be able to perform similar custom actions in an authentication or authorization script within the gateway, but tasks are often a more elegant and more readable way of archiving results.
Also, while a script needs to block waiting for external events to complete, a task can be asynchronous, so some operations especially those that do IO work will perform better when split into async tasks.
List of
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Tasks
The following tasks are currently available:
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- Base64 encode/decode
Base64 encode or decode any value - result is stored in a request attribute. - URL encode/decode
Allows you to URL encode/decode any value, variable or macro - result is stored in a request attribute. - HTML encode
Allows you to HTML encode a text - escapes any HTML characters ensuring the result is safe to display in a web page. - Transform JSON to XML
Transforms JSON into XML tags. - Transform XML to JSON
Transforms XML into JSON, note that some information will be lost in transit, such as attributes, order and namespaces. - Transform JSONML to XML
Transforms from JSON Markup Language into XML - see http://www.jsonml.org/ for information on JSON ML. - Transform XML to JSONML
Transform from XML into JSON Markup Language - this transformation can be reverted back into JSON without loss of data, but note that the format is quite verbose and may take up a lot of memory space.
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- Write to Trace
If request trace is enabled within the gateway, this writes a value to it. - Write to Log
Writes a value to the log at the given log level - logger name can also be specified. - Write to Transaction Log
Allows you to write a message to the transaction log - this log resides at the Ceptor Session Controller - implemented by individual authentication plugins so writing here is a remote call.
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