As part of understanding how policies work, it is important to understand the components of policies.
A policy operates on an XDS document and its primary purpose is to examine and modify that document. A policy can also get additional context from outside of the document and cause side effects that are not reflected in the result document.
The following outline describes the different elements of a policy:
An operation is any element that is a child of the input element and the output element. The elements are part of Novell’s nds.dtd, for more information, see NDS DTD. An operation usually represents an event, a command, or a status.
The policy is applied separately to each operation. As the policy is applied to each operation in turn, that operation becomes the current operation. Each rule is applied sequentially to the current operation. All of the rules are applied to the current operation unless an action is executed by a prior rule that causes subsequent rules to no longer be applied.
The object that is described by the src-dn, src-entry-id, dest-dn, dest-entry-id and association becomes the current object. For more information about the different elements, see the NDS DTD.