How does the InCommon 'preview' metadata aggregate work?

[Ken Weiss]

Another in a long series of really, really simple questions, I'm afraid... RTFM is a totally valid response, if you can point me to the right FM - I've googled around for an hour or two without finding an answer. I think my question is so basic the answer hasn't been documented.

Does an IDP get my SP's metadata from an InCommon metadata provider, or does the IDP get the metadata directly from my SP?

I want to publish new metadata for my SP with InCommon. InCommon has three possible metadata aggregates - production, fallback, and preview. I would like to test my metadata before I push it into the production aggregate.

Is the proper procedure to publish the metadata into the preview aggregate, and then set my SP's shibboleth2.xml configuration to use the preview metadata provider? Perhaps with a nice short refresh interval to ensure that I'm reading in the new data before I start testing? If the IDP is getting my SP's metadata directly from my SP, then that should do it. But if the IDP is getting my SP's metadata from InCommon, then I'll need to get the IDP to change to the preview aggregate as well, right?

I did review the IDP metadata provider documentation at https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/IdPMetadataProvider, and looked at some examples of IDP metadata such as "http://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml"<http://metadata.ukfederation.org.uk/ukfederation-metadata.xml>. It seems to be completely separate from SP metadata, so I'm inclined to guess that if I point my SP at the preview metadata and then attempt to log in using any of my federated IDPs, I'll be conducting a valid test. Is my guess correct?

--Ken

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Ken Weiss                                 ken.weiss at ucop.edu<mailto:ken.weiss at ucop.edu>
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