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Each profile flow is composed of a set of actions which perform some part of the overall processing necessary to generate the appropriate response. Requests pass from action to action until the response is complete and returned to the requester. Some example action might be While at the high level, there are "actions" to perform user authentication, attribute resolution, and response signing, the actual implementation of each action is much more fine grained. The details of the profile handlers and stages are discussed in message handling/processing chapter.
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Configuration files that are not expected to be touched by most deployers tend to use the generalized Spring bean file format. These configuration files are mostly about wiring the various services together and handling the "plumbing" of the IdP. Configuration files that are meant to be modified by deployers tend to rely on are a mix of native Spring and some custom schema configuration files. This hides both the boilerplate XML required by the generalized Spring bean files as well as the particulars of the Java classes that are being created and wired together.But even now, there are some user-modifiable files that use the native Spring syntax, and going
Going forward we expect to make broader use of Spring's native configuration format, and less of custom files, but backward compatibility demands that we continue to support the older formats. While native Spring syntax can be more complex in some ways, it's also more consistent, better documented, and allows for a lot of syntactic tricks that make advanced features much easier to take advantage of.
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