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Authentication

DevKit is compatible only with Studio 6 and Mule 3. To build Mule 4 connectors, see the Mule SDK documentation.

Your API probably enforces some kind of authentication in order for applications to talk to it on behalf of a user. Anypoint™ DevKit supports the following authentication schemes:

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.

In DevKit, connection management and authentication support are closely related. While a general purpose connection management framework is available for most protocols, OAuth authentication handles connection management differently.

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Assumptions

This document assumes you have already created a connector project with at least some basic functionality, and are now ready to implement authentication on your connector. At this point you may have already attempted to install your connector in Studio to test it.

Basic Authentication

Anypoint DevKit makes it easy to add Basic Authentication functionality to connectors, by applying annotations at the @Connector class level. This framework provides the following benefits, with minimal effort on the part of the connector developer:

  • transparent multitenancy - a Mule application can open many connections to a single target, using different credentials to connect on behalf of many users simultaneously.

  • connection pooling - automated management of a pool of instances of the connector class, to manage connection resources effectively.

  • the ability to automatically invalidate connection on exceptions, and to reconnect as needed.

See Basic Authentication for details on how to implement basic authentication in your connector.

OAuth V1

Anypoint DevKit makes the implementation of the OAuth V1 on your connector rather straightforward. By simply implementing OAuth 1 in your @Connector class, DevKit will manage all of the requests to the target service.

For details on implementing OAuth 1 in your connector, see Implementing OAuth V1 Authentication.

OAuth V2

DevKit support for OAuth V2 includes 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 connection to the target service.

For details on implementing OAuth 2 in your connector, see Implementing OAuth 2.0 Authentication.

Connection Management with Other Authentication Schemes

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

The page Basic Authentication describes how to apply connection management to your connector using annotations to @Connector class methods. The example describing using the annotations with basic username/password authentication, but the same methods apply for other methods as well.

You can also apply connection management to connectors that use no authentication at all. For details on implementing connection management in a connector with no authentication, see the Connector to SOAP Service via CXF Client Example.

Supporting Multiple Authentication Models in One Connector

Since version 3.3.1, Anypoint DevKit allows you to support multiple authentication models in the same connector JAR as extensions of a common base class. An abstract base class implements most functionality, such as connector operations; and 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. To enable this, 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, 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. Then, re-implement the authentication-specific functions in a child class, and implement a new child class supporting the second authentication method.

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