How the Object Modeling Concept is used in XACML Development Tool

Object models describe the system in terms of object classes. An object class is an abstraction over a set of objects with common attributes and the services (operations) provided by each object. Object models are natural ways of reflecting the real world entities manipulated by a system. These object classes that reflect domain entities are reusable across systems. This blog post is about how this concept of Object oriented modeling was used in XACML Development Tool.

There were few steps carried on when developing the object model.

Here high level requirements for which the object modeling is done was clarified. In this use case the object model was developed in order to produce an object of the XACML policy. The XACML policy object should be seen treated as a tree structure.

2. Defining the object model

i) Identify objects and classes

Here firstly the objects and classes that represent the real world entities were identified. In this use case, there were 7 of them as; Policy, Target, Rule, Condition, Obligation and TreeNode which is the parent node that is extended by the other classes, Attributes class which includes the attributes of a XACML policy.

ii) Prepare data dictionary

Next, the attributes of each class were identified.

For example let’s take the class TreeNode.

Let’s take the class Policy.

This is the class Attribute.

iii) Identify associations and aggregations

Next the association among the classes were identified. Here it was identified that TreeNode class is upon at the root element and other classes lay as the child classes of TreeNode Entity. Then methods which should represent the associations among the classes were identified.

Entity Policy should have methods underlying that it can accept rule or a target . Then it should have separate methods to add a rule and a target.

Class Rule should have methods underlying that it can accept target, condition or obligation. Then it should have separate methods to add a rule, target and an obligation.

Hence class condition and obligation do not accept any nodes there will be no methods that should be especially declared in them. So the class condition and obligation would be as follows.

Condition ->

Obligation ->

iv) Organize and simplify using inheritance

The object model we have up to now can be illustrated by below figure.

v) Iterate and refine the model

This is the next important task that should be proceeded. The model should be refined by checking whether it is enough to cater the requirements identified.

Hope you got a clear understanding on how the object concept is used in XACML Tool through this blog post. If you have any issues or comments on this blog post please leave a comment below.

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