1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for validating client access to a network-accessible data store. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for enabling an interface to validate a transaction request directed to a database system, and for configuring the transaction request based on an identification of the client that issued the transaction request.
2. Description of Related Art
In the field of network database systems, various approaches have been taken by software vendors to provide client validation and access to the database system. The ubiquitous nature of the Internet has resulted in numerous protocols and techniques for enabling client access to network database systems. The extensible markup language has emerged as one of the more popular protocols for describing and sharing data on the Internet.
A data provider hosting a database on the Internet will often allow access to the database by a wide variety of clients. It is frequently desirable to provide different access privileges to the database among various clients. In such a situation, different validation criteria are employed to allow or deny a client access to the database.
A common strategy employed for validating a transaction request is to provide a validation document at the server in the form of an (extensible markup language (XML) document type definition (DTD). However, a different DTD is required for each client that has different validation criteria. Accordingly, a number of DTDs are required to facilitate validation of various clients accessing the database according to different validation criteria. The performance of a network server providing validation services to numerous clients having different access criteria is adversely affected due to the number of files or network input/output calls needed to validate each DTD corresponding to a different client.
It would be advantageous to deploy a single validation object that can be used to provide access to different clients having different access criteria. Moreover, it would be advantageous to provide a singleton in-memory object that facilitates configuration and validation of mandatory fields that vary among transaction requests issued by different clients.