SIF Zone

A Zone is a collection of services within the Service Consumer’s Environment, pre-organized by the site administrator to correspond to discrete components within the owning educational organization (such as a school or district) or other conceptual groupings (ex: Special Ed students; Utility Services). 

Each Service “instance” accessible within the Service Consumer’s Environment is scoped to a Zone, although a given Service Provider implementation may support the same services in several Zones.

Default Zone

Each Service Consumer is assigned a “default” Zone at Registration time, which is used whenever a specific Zone is not otherwise included in one of service requests. If any consumer request does not have a matching Service Provider registered within the specified Zone, it must fail with and HTTP status 404 (Not Found).

Utility Services

Unlike an Object Service or Functional Service, every Utility Service must be applicable to all SIF 3 Zones in an Environment, and wherever present, is accessible by any properly authorized Service Consumer.  This is achieved by assigning all Utility Services to a preset unique Zone (infrastructure-utilities) and giving the Consumer access rights to the appropriate operations of each of these Services.

The Zones Utility Service provides a Registry of all available Zones within the Service Consumer’s Environment.

Conveying Zone

A Service Consumer conveys the zone name/id in the form of a Matrix Parameter. The name of the matrix parameter is “zoneId”.

Example: Getting all students for school with the school code “XYZ”. The zone name in this case is called “XYZ” (the unique name or code of the school).