Citrix Systems 9.2 manual About Actions and Profiles, Access Classic, Functions, Formats

Chapter 1 Introduction to Policies and Expressions 5

NetScaler Feature, Policy Type, and Policy Usage

Feature Name	Policy Type	How You Use Policies in the Feature
Access	Classic	To determine how the Access Gateway performs
Gateway		authentication, authorization, auditing, and other
		functions.
		Authorization policies, however, can be
		configured with both classic and advanced policy
		formats.

About Actions and Profiles

Policies do not themselves take action on data. Policies provide read-only logic for evaluating traffic. To enable a feature to perform an operation based on a policy evaluation, you configure actions or profiles and associate them with policies.

Note: Actions and profiles are specific to particular features. For information about assigning actions and profiles to features, see the documentation for the individual features.

About Actions

Actions are steps that the NetScaler takes, depending on the evaluation of the expression in the policy. For example, if an expression in a policy matches a particular source IP address in a request, the action that is associated with this policy determines whether the connection is permitted.

The types of actions that the NetScaler can take are feature specific. For example, in Rewrite, actions can replace text in a request, change the destination URL for a request, and so on. In Integrated Caching, actions determine whether HTTP responses are served from the cache or an origin server.

In some NetScaler features actions are predefined, and in others they are configurable. In some cases, (for example, Rewrite), you configure the actions using the same types of expressions that you use to configure the associated policy rule.

About Profiles

Some NetScaler features enable you to associate profiles, or both actions and profiles, with a policy. A profile is a collection of settings that enable the feature to perform a complex function. For example, in the Application Firewall, a profile for XML data can perform multiple screening operations, such as examining the data for illegal XML syntax or evidence of SQL injection.