How to Enable Automatic MDS Registration

OGSA-DAI WSRF services can automatically register data in a local Globus MDS Index Service deployed in the same container. It allows information such as the activityTypes, and more to be published so that it can be retrieved from an Index Service at any time. The only restriction is that the information must be a well known resource property of an OGSA-DAI data service resource.

The information published is on a per-resource basis, and can differ for each resource if that is desired.

There is an example registration file deployed with OGSA-DAI at examples/MDSRegistration/mds-registration-EXAMPLE.xml. This file contains the information required for a proper service group registration. There are a few configurable parameters that should be specified on a per resource basis. These parameters are as following:

RefreshIntervalSecs - the amount of that time that should pass before the registration is renewed for you. 600 seconds (i.e. 10 minutes) is generally sufficient, and certainly is for this example. This parameter's unit is in seconds.
PollIntervalMillis - this is the time interval that we use to poll data resource properties. It's important to not set this value too low, as there's little value in having it execute extremely frequently given the overhead. For our example registration file, it's set to 5 minutes (i.e. 300000 milliseconds). This means, the resource properties will be polled/updated once every 5 minutes. This parameter's unit is in milliseconds.
ResourcePropertyNames - these are the resource properties of your data service resource that should be published in the Index Service. You can add and remove resource properties as necessary. In the example registration file deployed, only two resource properties are specified by default. These are the productInfo and the activityTypes properties. There is no limit to the number of additional resource properties that can be added.

Once you've constructed a suitable registration file (based on the example), enabling the registration is only a matter of naming the registration file the proper way and putting it into the proper location. The convention chosen is to name your file mds-registration.xml, This registration file should be copied either to:

$GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/ogsadai_wsrf/RESOURCENAME if you are using the Globus container, or,
$CATALINA_HOME/webapps/wsrf/WEB-INF/etc/ogsadai_wsrf/RESOURCENAME if you are using Tomcat.

Where RESOURCENAME is the ID of the resource. When the container is restarted and the resource is activated, the information will be available in the Globus Index Service shortly after.

The information will not be available in the Index Service on container startup unless your resource is loaded when the container starts.

To enable (or disable) this behaviour, you can modify the service deployment descriptor. This is found in:

$GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/ogsadai_wsrf/server-config.wsdd in the Globus container, or,
$CATALINA_HOME/webapps/wsrf/WEB-INF/etc/ogsadai_wsrf/server-config.wsdd in Tomcat.

In there, you should see a parameter called loadOnStartup:

Uncomment or insert this parameter to enable registration:
```
<parameter name="loadOnStartup" value="true"/>
```

Comment the same parameter out to disable registration:

<!-- <parameter name="loadOnStartup" value="true"/> -->

An alternative way to disable this feature and no longer have your service automatically registered with the MDS Index Service, is to simply move the registration file to a different location. If the file is not found in the expected format and location, no registration will take place.