Basic workflow

This section outlines a recommended workflow for creating an authorization domain, including ALFA policies, attribute connectors for your PIPs, and associated tests. While this is a suggested approach, you can explore and learn ALFA and the Axiomatics Policy DevOps in any order.

The workflow is as follows:

1. Capture requirements

   Before implementing your authorization domain, document your business requirements and authorization use cases.

2. Create the dictionary

   Define attributes and their metadata to support policy evaluation.

3. Write the tests

   We recommend a test-driven development (TDD) approach for ALFA and your authorization domain. This involves writing and running a failing test before implementing any functional code (policies or attribute connectors). For more details, see "Testing ALFA policies."

4. Create the attribute connectors

   Implement attribute connectors that retrieve values from PIPs.

5. Create the policies

   The final step is to write ALFA policies and verify that all tests pass using the Visual Studio Code extension for ALFAOpens in a new tab.