IDP Relying Party Reload Behavior

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/19/11 1:50 PM, "John Mitchell" <jpmitchell at alaska.edu> wrote:
>1. Add some new metadata about about an SP to relying-party.xml using
>ResourceBackedMetadataProvider and a file.
>2. Config is reloaded on IdP after 15 minutes as expected and
>functions as expected.
>3. SP metadata file is changed.
>4. IdP never reloads the new SPs metadata and a restart is required.

Metadata reload has nothing to do with the relying-party reload other than
as a brute force alternative. Certainly that won't reload just because the
metadata does, nor would you want it to.

>Can someone educate me about what conditions trigger the IdP to reload
>the metadata file on the IdP?

If you tell it to and the file changes. I think there are some conditions
under which it seems to miss local file changes depending on when it
changes relative to the polling thread, but I haven't identified it.

> I have tried several things to make it
>reload like changing the MetadataProvider id and changing the filename
>in an effort to trigger the reload but it still has the old metadata.

If you change the relying-party.xml *file*, and it doesn't reload, then
the rest of the reloading isn't working right, but that's not the metadata
reload. That would require the metadata file to change.

-- Scott