Editing Application Mapping

You can only edit application mapping if you belong to the zeusafm Administrator user group, or if you belong to another user group that has the appropriate user rights.

Applications and their Rulesets aren’t used until you’ve mapped them to the customer keys, hosts, and prefixes of requests. Essentially, application mapping determines which request is processed by which rulesets. The following sections describe the configuration process. For general information on what application mapping is and how it works, see Application Mapping, Paths, Preconditions.

For further information regarding setting up vWAF, see Guide: Recommended Work Sequence.

Opening application mapping

To access the Application Mapping page, click the entry Application Mapping in the navigation area.

Adding a customer key

When using vWAF integrated in Virtual Traffic Manager, you typically don’t have any other customer keys than the empty “[Default Customer Key]” because typically there is only one cluster and all enforcers (your Traffic Managers) are identical.

To add a customer key:

  1. Enter the name of the key into the field next to the Add customer key button. Make sure that the spelling matches exactly the spelling as it was entered when setting the enforcer.location variable with the TrafficScript command: connection.data.set("enforcer.location“, “my-special-customer-key");.
  2. Click Add customer key. The new key appears below the empty [Default Customer Key]. The customer keys are sorted alphabetically.

Adding a mapping

To add a mapping:

  1. If the section below the customer key to which you want to add the mapping is hidden, click the key name.
    This expands the view. A table lists all already existing mappings for the key (if any).
  2. Below the table, choose an application from the drop-down list, and then click the Create Mapping button.
    The new mapping appears in the table

Editing hosts

To add hosts to a mapping:

  1. Click the arrow symbol in the Hosts column to expand the view.
  2. Click Add hostnames.
    A popup window with an edit field and some check boxes appears.

  3. Into the Enter hostnames field, enter the names of the hosts that you want to add. You can specify either a single host name or several host names, separated by commas, semicolons, space characters, or other delimiting characters.

    When specifying a host name, you can use the syntax *.hostname to cover several hosts with just one entry. For example, instead of specifying the two hosts intranet.company.com and shop.company.com you could also only specify *.company.com. The global placeholder * means “all hosts”. You can use this for setting up a “catch-all” mapping that matches in case no other host matches.

    When using the * placeholder, bear in mind that the order of your mappings is important. vWAF always processes the list from top to bottom. So always position a “catch-all” mapping at the end of your list of mappings.

  4. Hosts such as www.demo.com, demo.com, or demo.com:80 are different hosts and thus all need to be specified separately. To make adding these variations easier, you can activate one or more of the prefix and suffix options below the edit field. When adding each host from the edit field, vWAF then automatically also adds all corresponding combinations of prefixes and suffixes. For example, if the edit field contains the host names demo1.com;demo2.com and you’ve activated the check boxes www. prefix and :80 suffix, vWAF automatically adds: demo1.com, demo1.com:80, demo2.com, demo2.com:80, www.demo1.com, www.demo1.com:80, www.demo2.com, www.demo2.com:80.
  5. Click OK.

The new hosts now appear in the table.

If you want to change a host, you need to delete and add it again. To delete a host, click the arrow symbol in the Hosts column to expand the view so that it shows all hosts, and then click the corresponding Delete icon.

If you’ve added the same host to multiple mappings, this only deletes the host from one mapping but not from all mappings.

Editing prefixes

Note that regular expressions are not allowed within prefix definitions.

By default, each mapping contains an “[Empty Prefix]”, which matches everything. When adding your first own prefix, the default “[Empty Prefix]” is automatically removed.

To add a prefix to a particular mapping, click the arrow symbol in the Prefixes column, and then click Add prefixes.

You can add multiple prefixes in one go by adding them in separate lines in the edit field.

To delete a prefix, click the Delete icon next to the prefix name in the Prefixes column. When deleting the last of your own prefixes, the default “[Empty Prefix]” is automatically added again.

Changing the processing order

vWAF always processes the mappings from top to bottom in the same order as they’re listed in the administration interface. Only the first matching mapping is used. This can make a big difference if you’re using hostnames with the placeholder symbol *.

To change the order, click the orange arrow symbols in the Order column.

Using search

You can utilize the Search field on top of the Application Mapping page in two ways:

  • If you want to find one or multiple mappings that contain a particular host or prefix, just enter the name of this host or prefix. All matching applications are automatically highlighted. (You don’t have to click any submit button.)
  • You can also use the search function for testing how your mappings work. If you enter a full URL beginning with http://, all applications are highlighted that would match a request with this URL.

If you’re using several customer keys and if there are applications found below several customer keys, all applications under all customer keys are highlighted. If collapsed, the corresponding sections expand automatically.

Deleting a mapping

If you want to delete all mappings of a particular customer key, you don’t have to delete the mappings individually. When deleting the customer key, this also deletes all mappings under this key.

To delete a single mapping:

  1. If the mapping is not already shown, click the customer key to expand the corresponding section.
  2. Find the line that shows the mapping, and then click the Delete icon in the Action column.

Deleting a customer key

Deleting a customer key also deletes all mappings below this key, including your settings for hosts and prefixes. If you want to preserve your settings (to use them for another customer, for example), first export your mappings by clicking the green Export/ Import icon. For details see Export and Import.

To delete a customer key:

  1. Select the key that you want to delete from the drop-down list next to the Delete customer key button. Note that you can’t delete the empty [Default Customer Key]. (If your enforcers on all web servers do specify their own customer keys, simply don’t add any mappings for the [Default Customer Key].)
  2. Click Delete customer key.

    his only deletes the customer key from application mapping. To delete the customer key also from “enforcer.location” in TrafficScript, use the following command to reset the variable: connection.data.set("enforcer.location“, “my-specialcustomer-key").

Reviewing and committing or discarding changes to application mapping

Until you commit the changes that you’ve made to application mapping, these changes aren’t saved and don’t become active. If you have uncommitted changes, a green arrow appears next to the entry Application Mapping in the navigation area.

To save and activate your settings as they’re reflected within the administration interface:

  1. Click the Review changes button at the bottom of the Application Mapping page.

    A table appears, listing all current changes

  2. Check whether you want all of these changes to become active. In case you don’t want to apply a particular change, you need to go back to the main Application Mapping page and undo it manually.
    NOTE
    Don’t click Discard Changes unless you want to discard all of your changes. If you want to undo single changes, click Application Mapping in the navigation to go back to the main Application Mapping page.
  3. If you want to discard all of your changes, click Discard changes. If you want to commit all of your changes, click Commit changes.

    Unlike when committing rulesets, no history of your application mappings is saved. This means that once you commit, you can’t restore the previous state.