Building Interfaces to an Application

Frequently, other application owners must get access to your application. It is difficult for them to know exactly which servers to connect to and which services to use. This can occur when:

  • You want to connect to servers that are associated with other applications. To allow connections which use servers from the same domain, but are from another application, an administrator has to set the permissions by going to Settings > SecureApp Settings and selecting Allow users to create connections with external resources in both source and destination
  • When working in Interconnected Domains mode, and you want to connect to an application from another domain.

You can build and publish an application interface that defines the connections that other application owners must use to connect to your application. The application interface includes the servers and services needed to connect to your application. It also shows other application owners where they need to add their servers in order to build the necessary connections to your application.

To use application interfaces, you must:

  1. Create the application interface:
    1. Create an application interface with a name and an optional comment.
    2. Add interface connections to the application interface that include the servers and services that are needed to access the application.
    3. Publish the application interface to make it available to other applications.
  2. In another application create the connection to the application interface:
    1. Other application owners create connections to the application in their applications and select the necessary application interface.
    2. Application owners add their servers to the connection to the application and open a ticket to allow the access.

For example, all websites in your organization must connect to a database. The database application requires that the web server connect to the database server and to a user authentication server. As the database application owner, you can build an interface that includes a connection to the database server with the correct services, and another connection to the user authentication server. Now any website owner in your organization can use the interface that you created to add the necessary connections, and the website owner just needs to add the web servers that are used in the website.