There is often con­fu­sion among peo­ple who work with SIF regard­ing the ter­mi­nol­o­gy used with agents that gen­er­ate mes­sages and respond to requests for infor­ma­tion. In this arti­cle, we will address the terms that are used with these types of agents.

Publishing

Pub­lish­ing is a gener­ic term that means a giv­en agent gen­er­ates SIF mes­sages. It could mean that it gen­er­ates events, or it could mean that it responds to requests, or both.

Generating Events (Add, Change Delete)

A SIF agent may gen­er­ate events if the admin­is­tra­tor of the ZIS has autho­rized it to do so. There are sep­a­rate per­mis­sions in the agent's ZIS "ACL" entry for Add, Change, and Delete" per­mis­sion. As long as an agent has been giv­en per­mis­sion at the ZIS to gen­er­ate events, it may send these mes­sages. It does not need to tell the ZIS before­hand that it is going to attempt to send these event mes­sages.

Some SIF objects (such as Stu­den­tAt­ten­dance­Sum­ma­ry) do not sup­port SIF_Events. These objects must be request­ed by the sub­scriber and then the provider responds to the requests. See the SIF Spec­i­fi­ca­tion for this infor­ma­tion. Each SIF object states "SIF_Events are not report­ed for this object." or "SIF_Events are report­ed for this object."

Responding to Requests

Any SIF agent may be giv­en per­mis­sion to respond to a request; this does not mean that it will be the "Provider" for that object. Any SIF agent can make a spe­cif­ic request to anoth­er agent (by putting the Sour­ceId of the agent who is sup­posed to answer the request in the head­er). If the agent that is sup­posed to answer the request has been giv­en the abil­i­ty to "Respond to Requests" (anoth­er per­mis­sion in an agent's ZIS "ACL" entry), it will be giv­en the request and it should pro­vide an answer.

Providing

If an agent is giv­en per­mis­sion to Pro­vide, and the same agent sends a SIF_Provide mes­sage for a giv­en object, then it becomes the provider of that object. What this means is that when­ev­er a SIF_Request is sent by any agent in the zone and a spe­cif­ic Sour­ceId is NOT includ­ed in the head­er, the request is rout­ed by the ZIS to this agent. It is the default respon­der to requests in a zone for a giv­en object.