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The InCommon Federation provides a curated collection of thousands of Metadata elements. Shibboleth loads it from the URL supplied by InCommon when it starts up and then checks for updates every 8 hours. Shibboleth keeps the most recent copy of the data from InCommon in a file in the meatadata subdirectory, but that one file is downloaded from a URL and managed by Shib itself and does not come from Jenkins or Source Control.
A metadata provider file can define one metadata for one entity, or it can contain as many entities as you want. Yale could have combined all its local disk metadata into one file with one metadata provider Yale decides individually to combine some EntityDescriptors for a single application vendor into a single file, but generally we maintain different files in Source Control for unrelated Metadata. Therefore, we will generally create a new <MetadataProvider> element in the metadata-providers.xml file every time we add a new Metadata file . That seems simpler, but there is a problem. If an XML file has a syntax error, then the entire file is ignored. So if we combine all our metadata in one big file, then a single missing "/" makes the entire file unreadable. It seems safer even if it makes the configuration file more complicated to separate each metadata configuration for each partner in a separate file, so mistakes are localized to just the one partner with the problemto the Source Control directory. Remember that if there is any syntax error, a missing " or a missing / in the XML can kill the entire file. So putting a large amount of unrelated metadata in a single source file seems too dangerous, and the inconvenience of adding an additional Provider element for each new file is worth the safety of isolating the content of each file.
We define a number of metadata providers that initially point to empty files on disk. We take advantage of Shibboleth's ability to reload local disk files when they change, and the convention that metadata is taken from the first file that defines a particular entityid. We use this to address a problem with the unreasonably change-adverse IT administration at Yale.
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