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Triggering Data Updates

OPAL allows for other components to notify it (and through it all the OPAL clients , and their next-door policy agents) of data updates, triggering each client [subscribed to the published topic] to fetch the data it needs.

What is this good for?

Let's try an example - say your application has a billing service, and you want to allow access only to users who have billing enabled (enforced via a policy agent). You now need changes to the state of the billing service to be propagated to each of the enforcement points/agents (and preferably instantly [Users who've paid - don't like to wait 😅 ]).
With the OPAL's data-update-triggers feature the billing-service, another service monitoring it, or even a person can trigger updates as they need - knowing OPAL will take it from there to all the points that need it.

First, you need to obtain a data-source identity token (JWT)

Every service that publishes to OPAL needs a datasource identity token. Obtaining one is easy, but you need access to the corresponding OPAL Server master token.

Obtain a data source token with the cli:

opal-client obtain-token MY_MASTER_TOKEN --uri=https://opal.yourdomain.com --type datasource

If you don't want to use the cli, you can obtain the JWT directly from the deployed OPAL server via its REST API:

curl --request POST 'https://opal.yourdomain.com/token' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer MY_MASTER_TOKEN' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
  "type": "datasource",
}'

The /token API endpoint can receive more parameters, as documented here.

This example assumes that:

  • You deployed OPAL server to https://opal.yourdomain.com
  • The master token of your deployment is MY_MASTER_TOKEN.
    • In real life, use a cryptographically secure secret. If you followed our tutorials while deploying OPAL, you probably generated one with opal-server generate-secret.

How to trigger updates

There are a few ways to trigger updates:

Option 1: Trigger a data update with the CLI

Can be run both from opal-client and opal-server.

Example:

  • With $token being a JWT we generated in step 1.

  • we publish a data-event regarding two topics users and billing pointing clients to http://mybillingserver.com/users to obtain the data they need. we also provide the clients with the credentials they'll need to connect to the server (as HTTP authorization headers)

  • opal-client publish-data-update $token --src-url http://mybillingserver.com/users -t users -t billing --src-config '{"headers":{"authorization":"bearer secret-token"}}'

  • (Yes... We did... We put authorization in your authorization 😜  😅 )

  • See this recording showing the command including getting the JWT for the server with the obtain-token command.

Option 2: Trigger a data update with OPAL Server REST API

Option 3: Write your own - import code from the OPAL's packages

  • One of the great things about OPAL being written in Python is that you can easily reuse its code. See the code for the DataUpdate model at opal_common/schemas/data.py and use it within your own code to send an update to the server