Changes to web flow action proposal

[Brent Putman]

On 4/17/13 5:08 PM, Cantor, Scott wrote:
> My testing with scope="prototype" seems to suggest this will help us
> improve the readability of the web flow actions, so I've checked in some
> revisions to the refactoring I did.

I like the cleanup aspect, etc.  That looks good.

>
> opensaml-profile-impl
> 	org/opensaml/profile/action/impl/SchemaValidateXmlMessage.java



Looking at this makes me think about the question:  ProfileAction or MessageHandler?

When I originally in Columbus brought up the idea of pushing things down to OpenSAML where possible,
I had really only been thinking of some of the things that had been security policy rules before, or
things that might be logical post-decode or pre-encode steps, i.e. things that Chad had moved up to
the IdP as Webflow actions.  Now that it seems we're running whole-hog with this opensaml-profile-*
idea to its logical conclusion:  When should something be a MessageHandler and when a ProfileAction?

My thinking offhand is that, at the very least, something that operates on just the inbound, or just
the outbound, message, especially things that are just checking or validating something, would be
MessageHandlers.  This would also be true of things that implement general SAML (non-profile)
processing requirements.

And then things that are constructing messages based on profile requirements, pulling in user data,
authentication, etc would be ProfileActions.

And so, for example, before we started talking about this new fully pushed down model, the schema
validation one was in my mind one of the candidates for just becoming a MessageHandler, as are the
ones that just validate an IssueInstant, do replay checking and so forth.

Just wanted to get this out there before we get too far into this.