reloadable list in mfa flow?

[Cantor, Scott]

> I can pass a list of RP names to my mfa flow beans through a custom object
> defined in global.xml.  However, that isn't reloadable on-the-fly.  Is there an
> obvious way to maintain a reloadable list in the mfa flow?  It would save my
> having to do a rolling update when the list changes.

Generally the best way to tackle that is by redesigning the approach around a piece of the system that is already reloadable, either driving something through a RelyingPartyOverride (you can interrogate for that configuration object's ID at runtime) or via a tag in metadata. For MFA, the RP approach is usually pretty effective.

I did have this same question at one point and I did some work with some fairly questionable Spring trickery and managed to create a working prototype of a Spring context that can get collections like that to be reloadable. It's not pretty, and it hasn't really been used or tested under real world conditions. The code for it is shipping in 3.4 but I haven't documented it to this point.

With all the tag-driven changes coming in that release most of what I was going to do with it is usually going to be easier to pull off with metadata. It may be more elegant to do it with lists but it's also a lot more fragile and dependent on Spring not noticing what I'm doing and rightly freaking itself out.

I can document it for you if you remind me if you can't come up with a better idea.

-- Scott