CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Policies and

Expressions

For many NetScaler features, policies control how the feature evaluates data, which ultimately determines what the feature does with the data. A policy uses a logical expression, also called a rule, to evaluate requests, responses, or other data, and applies one or more actions determined by the outcome of the evaluation. Or a policy can apply a profile, which defines a complex action.

Some NetScaler features use advanced policies, which provide greater capabilities than do the older, classic, policies. If you migrated to a newer release of the NetScaler software and have configured classic policies for features that now use advanced policies, you might have to manually migrate policies to the advanced-policy format.

In This Chapter

Advanced and Classic Policies

Advanced and Classic Expressions

About Migration from Classic to Advanced Policies and Expressions

Before You Proceed

Advanced and Classic Policies

Classic policies evaluate basic characteristics of traffic and other data. For example, classic policies can identify whether an HTTP request or response contains a particular type of header or URL.

Advanced policies can perform the same type of evaluations as classic policies. In addition, advanced policies enable you to analyze more data (for example, the body of an HTTP request) and to configure more operations in the policy rule (for example, transforming data in the body of a request into an HTTP header).

In addition to assigning a policy an action or profile, you bind the policy to a particular point in the processing associated with the NetScaler features. The bind point is one factor that determines when the policy will be evaluated.

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Citrix Systems 9.2 manual Introduction to Policies Expressions, Advanced and Classic Policies