It is also possible to provide addtional configuration. In some cases, the additional configuration might be important to establish a proper connection to the remote producer.
One such optional configuration concerns caching. To prevent useless roundtrips between the local consumer and the remote producer, it is possible to cache some of the information sent by the producer (such as the list of offered portlets) for a given duration. The rate at which the information is refreshed is defined by the expiration-cache attribute of the <wsrp-producer> element which specifies the refreshing period in seconds. For example, providing a value of 120 for expiration-cache means that the producer information will not be refreshed for 2 minutes after it has been somehow accessed. If no value is provided, GateIn will always access the remote producer regardless of whether the remote information has changed or not. Since, in most instances, the information provided by the producer does not change often. It is recommended that you use this caching facility to minimize the bandwidth usage.
It is also possible to define a timeout after which the WS operations are considered as failed. This is helpful to avoid blocking the WSRP service, waiting forever on the service that does not answer. Use the ws-timeout attribute of the <wsrp-producer> element to specify how many milliseconds the WSRP service will wait for a response from the remote producer before timing out and giving up.
Additionally, some producers require consumers to register with them before authorizing them to access their offered portlets. If you know that information beforehand, you can provide the required registration information in the producer configuration so that the consumer can register with the remote producer when required.
At this time, though, only simple String properties are supported and it is not possible to configure the complex registration data. This should, however, be sufficient for most cases.
Registration configuration is done via the <registration-data> element. Since GateIn can generate the mandatory information for you, if the remote producer does not require any registration properties, you only need to provide an empty <registration-data> element. Values for the registration properties required by the remote producer can be provided via the <property> elements. See the example below for more details. Additionally, you can override the default consumer name automatically provided by GateIn via the <consumer-name> element. If you select to provide a consumer name, please remember that this should uniquely identify your consumer.