How to use drag-and-drop for creating a reusable processing rule in IBM Datapower

The basic method of creating a reusable processing rule is by dragging the cursor over a part of the existing processing rule. For a very small group of actions this is fine. If you want to make the rule a bit more advanced you probably want to create the processing rule from scratch. This can be achieved by creating a ‘Call processing rule’ action and create the reusable processing rule starting from there.

The problem with this approach is that you cannot use the Datapower drag-and-drop interface you use for all other processing rules. The GUI presents you the same view you get for all processing rules in the ‘Objects’ menu. It lists the different actions, but that’s it. No overview of the used contexts on mouse-over, or other details of the actions besides their name.

A simple solution to overcome this problem is to create the reusable rule in a Multi-Procotol Gateway Policy.
Go to the page ‘Multi-Protocol Gateway Policy’ by following the link in the menu on the left (Services>Multi-Protocol Gateway>Multi-Protocol Gateway Policy).
Create a new policy that will contain all future reusable rules. In my example I called it ‘ReusableRules’.

You can open this policy and add as much rules to it as you like. For the match action you can pick any existing match (f.e. all (url=*)). This match is only used in this policy. When calling a processing rule from within another rule the match action is not used.

 

To call this processing rule from within the ‘Call processing rule’ action you just have to select your newly created rule in the dropdown-box as you can see in the screenshot below.

 

Author: Tim