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Authentication and Connection Management

Most Web services require some form of authentication when connecting and sending requests. On the client side, many Mule applications need to manage multiple connections to the same target – for example, a developer of an application interacting with an e-commerce site on behalf of thousands of users would need to efficiently manage the many connections that might be live at any given moment.

Connection management and authentication support are closely related functionality in Anypoint Connector DevKit. While a general purpose connection management framework is available for most protocols, OAuth authentication handles connection management differently. If you are not familiar with OAuth, Dancing with OAuth: Understanding How Authentication Works is a widely-cited and accessible overview of how the flavors of OAuth work.

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Assumptions

This document assumes you have created a connector project, installed and tested it in Mule Studio, and are ready to implement authentication on your connector.

OAuth 2 Authentication

The DevKit’s support for OAuth 2 incorporates its own form of connection management support. Implement OAuth2 in your @Connector class, and DevKit will transparently manage multiple connections, including maintaining access tokens for multiple connections to the target service.

See Implementing OAuth 2.0 Authentication for details on how to implement OAuth 2 authentication in your connector.

OAuth 1.0a Authentication

OAuth 1 support in DevKit is limited to implementing single-tenant connectors. If you must use OAuth 1.0a authentication, your options are:

  • Implement some framework of your own for managing multiple sets of OAuth 1 credentials and build a connector without using DevKit;

  • Deploy and run multiple instances of your application, each managing credentials for a single account.

See Implementing OAuth 1.0 Authentication for details on how to implement OAuth 1 authentication in your connector.

If you have a requirement to use OAuth 1 authentication in a connector and you need multi-tenancy as well, contact MuleSoft for guidance.

Connection Management with Other Authentication Schemes

DevKit makes available the connection management framework. It provides management of credentials for multiple simultaneous connections, pooling connection instances to allow for efficient connection re-use, and automated handling for invalidating lost connections and reconnecting when needed.

Implementing Connection Management describes applying the connection management to your connector by applying annotations to @Connector class methods. The example describes using the annotations with basic username/password authentication, but the same methods apply for other methods as well.

Connection management can also be applied in connectors that use no authentication at all. The Connector to SOAP Service via CXF Client Example illustrates implementing connection management in a connector with no authentication.

Supporting Multiple Authentication Models in One Connector

As of version 3.3.1, Anypoint Connector DevKit allows you to support multiple authenticaiton models in the same connector JAR, as extensions of a common base class. The Salesforce connector illustrates how to structure the connector code to support this feature. An abstract base class implements most functionality, such as the connector operations; child classes of the base class implement the authentication logic and connection management if applicable.

Supporting both OAuth and simple authentication in the same connector JAR means having two config elements in the same XML namespace. You can use the parameter configElementName of the @Connector annotation. For example, the Salesforce OAuth2 connector class sets the configElementName to config-with-oauth, rather than the default value, config. As a result, in XML, you use either` sfdc:config-with-oauth` or sfdc:config, to pick the needed version of the connector.

Implementing such a connector is an advanced technique; if you decide to do this, start by implementing one method, such as OAuth, then refactor to separate all authentication-independent functionality in the @Connector class into an abstract class, re-implement the authentication-specific functions in a child class, then implement a new child class supporting the other authentication method.

See Also