Shibboleth XML Configuration file Validation

[Peter Schober]

More of a users question, but anyway:

* Mark O'Quinn <mark1oquinn at gmail.com> [2012-09-28 17:03]:
> At the moment I'm running some tests with Google Apps and I am
> provisioning SPs as this document mentions:
> https://developers.google.com/google-apps/help/articles/shibboleth2.0
> where the SPs are included in the relying-party.xml, but you said
> using this file is rarely needed, can you please explain a little
> more about it?

That's not the Shibboleth documentation, of course.
Either way, usually you'd define one or a couple of metadata providers
in your relying party and then have each metadata provider provide
more thatn one SP (by means of EntitiesDescriptor/EntityDescriptor
SAML metadata).
You would group them by some common property, e.g. being broken about
some standard behaviour and need to be treated slightly differently.
Or because some of those metadata instances are automatically
generated (programmatically, based on RDBMS lookups, whatever)  and
you don't want to lose the manually maintained ones.

Most metadata providers are already reloaded by default (see the docs)
and you can fine tune that via lots of knobs.

SO no reason to create new metadata providers for each new SP and no
reason to reload relying-party.xml or restart the context/container
for that either.
-peter