WinGate has been designed with a powerful new Policy system that allows you to control and manage WinGate more effectively. The word policy usually refers to a set of rules, or a defined course of action that will be taken in order to deal with a certain event. When used in WinGate, a policy defines how WinGate will react when a particular event occurs during the course of its operation.
The Policy system is known as an event processor in WinGate. This means that it has been designed to respond appropriately to the occurrence of events that have been registered with the WinGate Events system by other WinGate modules and components. Each policy you create will be based around one of these registered events happening somewhere in WinGate. This could be a policy that is processed whenever a user connects to a service, or a policy that is implemented whenever a response is received by WinGate from a remote server.
Unlike most traditional Policy systems that only give you a static list of options in the configuration of each policy, the WinGate Policy system takes a more dynamic approach. When you create a policy in WinGate, you are required to create a graphical flow chart of steps that should be processed in a logical sequence when the selected event occurs. Each step can be either a decision or an action the policy should make when the policy is processed. Since all policies in WinGate have access to the data related to an event when it takes place, each decision in the flow chart can be configured to respond and act more intelligently, depending on the conditions at the time.
The outcome of each decision can determine the next path the policy processing should take. This could be to evaluate another policy item, perform an action (such as sending an email or stopping a service) or simply bring the policy to a defined end result. This means that a policy could provide numerous different outcomes depending on the conditions when the event occurred. This flexible and dynamic approach allows you to make the policy as simple or complex as you require.
The Policy system provides a policy editor that contains the tools (policy items) that you can use to create the decision, action, and result steps of the flow chart. It also has a worksheet space where you can place the policy items that will form the steps of the policy flow. Policy items can then be connected to each other with directional arrows to construct the graphical layout of the flow chart.
The two examples below illustrate the concepts behind creating simple and more complex policies using the policy editor flow chart.
A simple policy that just performs an action (starting a mail monitoring application) when a client connects to the IMAP4 server(ClientConnect event).
A more complex policy that is evaluated whenever a client makes a proxy type request to the WWW Proxy server (ProxyRequest event). This policy uses decisions to evaluate the event data which could result in three different outcomes.
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